The Brave and the Bold and the Slightly Illegal
by Gogol
Summary: Being the swashbuckling story of the JUSTICE LEAGUE OF ANKH-MORPORK, an insidious band of vigilantes whose evil might be thwarted only through the efforts of mild-mannered journalist SAM VIMES JR., his father's ghost, & eighteen dead, goldfishy sidekicks!
1. Three Preludes

**(Three) Preludes In One: A Prologue Cubed  
**

_In which His Grace - most ungraciously - gives up the ghost, a vampire suffers indignancies at the hand of the notorious Chriek, and Sam Vimes, Jr., finally gets a job_

It was generally agreed, insofar as anything is generally agreed about on the Disc, that Commander Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch, while undoubtedly a man of many virtues**(1)**, was not a clever man. He had resigned himself to it. When a troll tells you you're dense, it's a hard thing to deny. Intelligence, he found, by the time he had any reason to, was overrated; obstinacy often did just as well, with the added bonus of a far higher probability of explosions. And shouting. Commander Vimes liked a good shout. It did wonders for his nerves**(2).**

So yes. He was stupid. He was not the brightest bulb in the bin, not the edgiest blade in the armory, or the twinkliest tooth in Chrysoprase's grin.

But just now he felt like the sharpest bleedin' _spoon_ in the bleedin' crayon box**(3)**.

"What the hell are you staring at?" he snapped at Captain Carrot. "The vampire's running off on foot! You can still - ah."

There was a thoughtful pause.

"That doesn't change anything!" he said, at last, kicking his corpse - which lay sprawled across the cobblestones and looked depressingly wrinkled and shrunken, from the outside - with a ghostly foot.

I BEG TO DIFFER.

Vimes turned around. He was not particularly surprised to see the seven-foot tall skeleton in a cowl behind him. The anthropomorphism's regular visits and politely capitalized 'AHEMS' were familiar, by now. It practically came with the job, anyhow.

Well. In this case, with the early and posthumous retirement stretching before his mind's eye**(6)**.

"Damn," he said.

INDEED. IF YOU WOULD BE SO GOOD AS TO STEP A LITTLE WAYS BACK, COMMANDER?

Vimes gave Death a Look. It was a pretty good look. The phrase 'hairy eyeball' might have been involved in its conception. Death, alas, met it steadily and without apparent uneasiness; the two sapphire flames in the shadowy depths of his hood did not so much as flicker.

"Fine," he said grudgingly, and hurriedly hopped out of the way as Death lifted his scythe - with, perhaps, just the slightest hint of drama - and brought it whistling down in a curved line of brilliant blue, which hung in the air for a moment and left orange afterimages in Vimes' vision when he closed his spectral eyelids.

And the bright cord connecting his ankle to his... _ankle _snapped, with a sad little 'twang' and a sigh as the shivering tension was released.

Sam Vimes died.

"Erm," he said, after nothing resolutely continued to occur. "Wasn't there... something supposed to come next? A door, or something?" he added, fumbling back to his roots in Cockbill Street, which had been associated with some polite and oft-trodden upon religion with a god who looked a bit of a milksop but was an all right sort.

YES.

"What?"

YOUR MORPHIC RESONANCE SHOULD HAVE DISSOLVED SUFFICIENTLY TO LOOSE YOUR GRIP ON THIS WORLD AND SEND YOU INTO THE AFTERLIFE OF YOUR CHOICE AND BELIEF.

Vimes considered this for a moment.

"...come again?"

Death sighed. INSTEAD, IT WOULD APPEAR YOU HAVE BECOME A GHOST. IT HAPPENS. I MIGHT WISH THAT IT HAD NOT HAPPENED TO SUCH A TROUBLESOME SOUL AS YOURSELF, BUT IT HAPPENS.

"Excuse me? 'Troublesome soul'? What is that, a diagnosis?"

NO, MISTER VIMES. I THINK IT A RATHER ACCURATE DESCRIPTION, GIVEN YOUR HISTORY.

"My hist-oh. Er. This isn't quantum again, is it?" said Vimes, with growing suspicion.

I WOULD NOT KNOW, said Death, an edge of chilliness entering his impossibly leaden tones for the first time. I TRY MY BEST TO AVOID THE STUFF. IN THIS CASE I AM HAPPY TO SAY THAT THE PROBLEM SEEMS A LITTLE MORE ORDINARY. PLEASE ATTEMPT TO KEEP IT THAT WAY. He slid the scythe back into his belt, and snapped his phalanxes with a horrible bony little click.

Suddenly, quite a lot of the remaining space in the alleyway was taken up by a horse. Carrot and Ping, bent over their superior's body, did not appear to notice. Vimes blinked.

"Are you going?"

I _AM_ A RATHER BUSY... ANTHROPOMORPHISM, MISTER VIMES. The skeleton relented slightly at his pleading look, and added, IF YOU MUST KNOW, THERE'S BEEN A PLAGUE IN HERSHEBA. I REALLY SHOULD BE OFF.

"Just - hold on one moment, can't you?" Vimes growled, as the Reaper swung onto the stallion's back, and in an act of highly unwise desperation grabbed the reins. The horse looked at him sideways and pawed the pavement irritably. This kicked up sparks. He ignored it. "You haven't explained anything!"

VERY WELL. WHAT EXACTLY IS IT YOU DESIRE TO KNOW?

"You said I was a ghost," said Vimes. "Why? What does that _mean?"  
_

YOU WILL REMAIN A SEMI-CORPOREAL PRESENCE HERE UNTIL SUCH A TIME AS WHATEVER... Death waved a bony hand vaguely ...UNRESOLVED MATTER OF YOUR LIFE HAS BEEN, WELL, RESOLVED. BY YOU, OR ONE OF YOUR DESCENDENTS. NOW, MAY I HAVE YOUR PERMISSION TO GO?

This last was almost satirical, although there were a few too many glands still missing for sarcasm to be the word.

"Er, yes," said Vimes, embarrassed. He let go, and tried not to think about the fact that his fingers brushed against the hot velvet of the horse's flank and straight _through _the tack they had so recently been clinging to - with very little point, it would appear.

"Sorry," he added.

HMPH, said Death. BINKY, UP.

His steed reared, white mane flowing back like a banner unmarred by pigeon crap, and leapt into the air, galloping through the suddenly foreshortened sky in a way not unreminiscent of cheesy sci-fi effects, which was right and proper.

There was a hollow pause. Then:

_"Binky?"_

**(1) Foremost of which, for some of those in agreement over his intelligence, being that he had not yet had them hauled off to Tanty.**

**(2) And everyone else's in the immediate area of earshot (a half-mile radius), of course. 'Wonders' is a word of many meanings.**

**(3) The available cutlery being, by analogy, Captain Carrot(4), Sergeant Ping(5), and his dead body - in the crayon box of a gloomy alleyway. As mixed metaphors went, it had a certain something.**

**(4) A cleaver of a mind if ever there was one, to keep up with the culinary theme.**

**(5) Who was one of those mysterious spoons with all the holes in.**

**(6) His body no longer having any eye to speak of, let alone contemplate retirement with.**

*****

And to the rest of the Disc, His Grace the Duke of Ankh, Commander Sir Samuel Vimes was dead. With a few complications.

Many things happened next, some of them quite quickly. The death, as deaths go, was an important one - certainly it overshadowed the many births which took place on the same day, at least to humanity, which says a lot about humanity's mixed priorities and fondness for wearing black and silver at inopportune moments. A catalyst of sorts, shall we say; a beginning. One of many.

There were other beginnings, tied by unseen threads to the death of the late Commander. Countless others: but only two others, as it were, really mattered, by the standards of that same species. Only two others that also made for a nice frame, a shiny bookend. In total three: the death, and...

But the story is getting ahead of itself.

The second beginning spun itself into tenuous being several months before the first, on a dark and stormy night at the Black Ribboners' official headquarters, deep in the bowels of Morpork, around whose cheerily painted picketed fence even the most hardened criminals did not dare to creep, for fear of being offered the thin and insipid cocoa favored by its inhabitants.

In one of the curtained back rooms, where discreet and considerably less than reformed vampires of good standing came to inquire after being staked one too many times and losing just a little too much in repair expenses after the mob was through with their castle, a spiky figure was speaking in hoarse, hushed tones appropriate to the occasion. 'Spiky' was the word, yes; a profile, silhouetted against the candle light, all elbows and pointy beard and a folded suggestion of bat wings, angles and leather and anatomically implausible claws.

Across the plastic table covered with frisking pink gnomes painted by someone who had never been, ah, fortunate enough to encounter a living, breathing specimen, Otto Chriek adjusted his bow tie and looked rather strained.

"There are precedents," the figure said.

"Yes and no," said Otto. "Not alvays are zer obsessions... tangible. But never has such an inspecific goal been attempted -"

"Hah! Look at _you, _Otto! Light and color!"

"I vas a special case, La-"

"Don't call me that."

"Aha. No, you are beink very secretive about zis business, are you not? No names, no nothink."

"I do not want -"

"Your new friends back home to talk? Zen perhaps you should not have come. Transference is... for life, you understand?"

"Of course I do. But I must. For _them._"

"Oh very well," said Otto, somewhat testily. "But vhy do you insist on zis ridiculous object of transference?"

"Never mind that. It can be done, can it not?"

"Vell, ve can try," said Otto. "You vill be ze first. Are you sure I cannot persuade you -"

"What about Margolotta?"

"Vhat about her?" said Otto, dismissively. "She vanted control. Control, it is _easy. _She vas one of ze pioneers of ze technology, anyvay, she did not use... the advanced methods we have available to us. But this..."

"You cannot stop me. You claimed it would happen naturally, whatever the... transferer's intent was, and I am very strong in my resolution."

"Yes, I know," said Otto, giving him a searching look from over his sunglasses. "It makes me vonder. Vhy are you so sure of yourself?"

The vampire across the table from him looked to his left, and to his right.

"Mister I-do-not-vant-to-be-named, ve are in a building full to zer brim vith superhuman ex-monsters," said Otto. "_Everyone _can hear you. Ve are beink polite. Please, do not bother vith zer niceties."

The vampire open his mouth to protest, revealing two glinting canines. Otto raised his impeccable black eyebrows**(1). **The vampire sagged.

"All right, all right, I know," he muttered, "but it's for the look of the thing."

"Zer look of the thing?"

"You'll see," said the vampire. "It's important. It has to... be perfect, what I am doing for them."

"And so you cannot tell me anything and must sneak around and vear that ridiculous goatee?" Otto demanded.

"Yes," said the vampire. "But do not worry about me. It will work. It has been done before."

"_Vhat? _By whom? Vhen? How do you know this? You must -"

"Begin the 'cold bat' phase immediately," the vampire cut in. "Please, Otto."

They stared at each other.

"Aftervards you vill tell me everything?" said Otto, softly.

"Of course."

"You vill not reconsider?"

"Never. Don't worry, Otto. I will be fine. I will be better than I have been since I was bitten."

"Oh, all right," Otto said at last, and pulled a lever conveniently placed under the table. A trapdoor opened. There was a little moment as gravity remembered itself, pulled down its shirt, pulled up its skirt, and tried to wipe the lipstick marks of Cartoonish Humor off its face before hurrying off to work.

Then there was a scream and a hilarious 'thud', as the anonymous vampire was dumped into Confinement (Period One), a padded room involving more lace than was healthy, and the hole in the ceiling closed up with an ominous clunking.

Otto smiled despite himself as the indignant shrieks began, barely muffled by the floorboards in between them. Even the best of reformed vampires can be - well - _suckers_ for tradition.

**(1) A trick he had picked up from examining some of the few iconographs of the Patrician he had obtained using dark light. Several moved, and he was a good mimic of the little gestures that went into that perfect skeptical arc of brow.**

*

And now for the third and most distantly related beginning, _prologue, _opening act: chronologically and otherwise.

Samuel Vimes, Jr. was a fine sober**(1) **young gentleman of nineteen years, handsome, charming, and decent, for given values of beauty, charm, and decency, anyway; an Assassin's guild graduate of good standing, a terrible dancer but an excellent conversationalist, known to have inherited at least a small portion his mother's social graces, tact, and both of her pretty blue eyes**(2)**, although the more honest among his peers would grant that it was disconcerting to see the eyes that looked so pleasant and cheerful in Lady Sybil's round old face in a countenance that was every bit of it Vimes**(3)**. Nevertheless, a credit to his family - at least until he went and applied for a job at the _Times_.

William de Worde hired him without a blink in front of the open, listening ears of at least twenty-three dwarves and then hauled him into his office to interrogate him.

"The fact that I'm one of your journalists means you're going to refrain from writing down my explanation and publishing it, right?" said Sam.

"Wrong," said William promptly. "Well. I am going to refrain, but only until tonight, when your father comes and has your skin for his trophy shelf."

"He doesn't actually have a trophy shelf," Sam pointed out.

"You're his son, I'm sure he can come up with something on short notice. Why are you _doing _this? Is this your expression of rebellious feelings? Because honestly I would have thought attending the Assassin's Guild and graduating with full honors would have satisfied _that _particular urge -"

"His expression was pretty good when I told him," Sam admitted. "But no, that's not it. I really do want to be a news reporter, Mr. de Worde. And I'm an adult. He can't stop me."

"Famous last words."

"This way at least the people writing my obituary will know me, right?" Sam tried a smile. His new editor winced.

"That's not the blessing you think it is," he murmured, and then started to grin.

"I, on the other hand, could stop you, legally as well as practically. But I'm not going to," he said at last. "You might even be good at it, if you survive the Commander's wrath."

"Really?" said Sam, with apparent shock.

"Really," de Worde affirmed, with a wry look. "You do want to be a journalist, don't you? It's a fine ambition, as I can testify to, wanting to serve the Truth. And it's not as if it's skilled work, as long as you can punctuate. So go forth and gather news, my young suicidal friend."

"Er, yessir," said Sam.

"Did you bring your own notebook?"

Sam colored slightly and with infinite care pulled a cheap one from inside his jacket, where it had obviously been concealed for some time from his father's watchful gaze.

"My word," said William, covering his face delicately with one thin hand when he saw that it was already halfway filled up with copious notes and many names followed by a telltale set of parentheses and numbers. The lad had been practicing. At length, it would appear. "Very good. Run along, then."

"Thank you," said his newest employee, with an expression of fervent relief that made him look his age for the first time, and dashed out into the main press room.

"You're welcome," William shouted, to the closed wooden door, which had slammed shut behind Sam. "I think you'll do very well!"

He sat back down at his desk and added, quietly, to himself, "Though at _what _I wouldn't care to say."

**(1) The combined efforts of a sadistic and manipulative godfather and a bullheaded father had ground out any youthful inclinations towards a taste of vice and a trap for the spirit, as Hughnon Ridcully put it. Oh, and the fact that most of the alcohol he had encountered, before the age seventeen, was sherry; that didn't hurt his apparently permanent sobriety either.**

**(2) This in spite of Igor's very best efforts.**

**(3) i.e., scrawny and with ancestral cynicism(4) already etching faint lines around the mouth and between the eyebrows.**

**(4) Thus disproving once and for all the theories expressed in Leonard da Quirm's _On How Various Animals Mutated And Grew Bits And Things - _at least those which challenged the feasibility of acquired traits.**


	2. A Discourse On The Grateful Dead

**Chapter One: A Discourse On The Grateful Dead (And Most Ungrateful Goldfish)**

_In which Sam Vimes, Jr., seeks spiritual guidance from his father's NCO's landlady (she came recommended) and Sam Vimes, Sr., acquires a following of a distinctly piscine - and post-mortem - nature  
_

Narrativium - that element so integral to the Disc's dubious chemical make-up - had worked its magic, and though it was nominally spring in Ankh-Morpork, the rain sheeted down on the aftermath of Commander Vimes' funeral as if there would be no tomorrow, and were there a tomorrow, it would most _certainly _not be a cheerful May one.

The populace considered it only appropriate, this being the sending-off for the most cynical old bastard of a copper that had been seen for a good century.

And the rain lashed at the window-panes and splattered against the sidewalk; it ran black and brackish through the streets, but worse still trickled green and fluorescent across the turgid Ankh.

And it pattered, more gently, on the bowed head of Sam Vimes, who was feeling unexpectedly numb. He had done a little undignified choking when he first heard the news, and had spent much of the day since then trying to comfort his mother**(1)** and sleeping.

Now, however, he felt somewhat stiff, but not overly grieved, per se. That might have had something to do with the fact that he was soaked to the bone and had been pounding on the door of Mrs. Cake's illustrious residence for at least five minutes.

And then, of course, there was the reason that he was there in the first place. When one is seeking out a medium in order to hold discourse with a dead father, it's a little hard to get overly teary and profound about the fact of his death. One's thoughts tend more towards the possibility of crystal balls and whether or not one should have come around to the back.

Even as he considered this, the door swung open beneath his upraised fist.

"Yes!" snapped the Hat that met his eyes, bedecked as it was with fake cherries and... glittering things. "Does no one ever start out with anything but that!"

"Your premonition's on, Mrs. Cake," Sam said, helpfully, and adjusted his angle of view by lowering his head until his chin was digging into his chest, the better to get a glimpse under the mighty brim of a familiar face that had often - very, very often - given him an evil-eyed stare while he waited for Sergeant Angua to come out and teach him the Campfire Howl.

Mrs. Cake did not appear grateful for this observation; she reached up to her hairy ear and fiddled with it disturbingly, then said: "Oo, must you? Now oi've got a bloody headache. I hates it when you young 'uns get smart with me."

"Sorry, ma'am," said Sam, "but it's very important."

"Is it now?" she said. "Come in, then."

"All right."

"Oi expect this is about your father," she said, once they were inside and he was eyeing the beaded curtains with a certain refined unease.

He started. "I thought you turned it off!"

She gave him a withering look. "Oi did. But anyone 'oo's 'eard of you coulda told that."

He winced. "Well. Yes. I just, er. I thought I saw him at the funeral."

"Dun't know about that. Dun't know about this business of _unprofessionals _seein' their lost love ones," Mrs. Cake muttered.

"Er," said Sam. And then: "Sorry?"

"You should be. But you're right, oi s'pose, about your father, anyhow."

"What do you mean, right?"

"Oi mean 'e's done gone and become a ghost."

"He's a _ghost?" _said Sam, eyes bulging magnificently out of his head.

"Well, yes. Oi 'ad 'im pinned as a zombie sort, meself, but each to their own. There's nothing wrong with ghosts, you know."

"Of course not," said Sam, who had been raised to be conscientious of these things; then he realized what he had just said. "I mean, yes! There is! There really is! I thought ghosts only happened when there was something... unfinished?"

"Maybe so," conceded Mrs. Cake, "maybe so. Pers'nally oi find as often as not it's 'cos they're bloody-minded buggers."

"I thought that was zombies."

"You gets all sorts."

"Ah," said Sam, a little distantly.

They sat at the round table in silence for a while. Mrs. Cake worked on her knitting.

"_Really _a ghost?"

"Would oi lie to you, young man?"

"No, no. I'm just surprised," he said, which was a smooth and towering a falsehood befitting to a pursuer of Truth in all her aspects. "It's not every day that you find out your father's, er, stayed on, as it were."

"Oi should hope not! Oi'd have no bloody free time between seances." She glanced meaningfully at the clock as she said this. "D'you want a fortune-telling as well or are youse content with what you've got?"

"Er, quite content, thank you," said Sam. "Um. Will I be able to - see him? As a ghost?"

"Maybe," said Mrs. Cake, considering. "It depends. You've got a better chance than most, since you're 'is son, and all. Are you occultly co-gee-ni-zant?"

"Possibly?" said Sam.

"Hmph."

"Could you - contact him for me? In case I'm, well, not? What you said. Cognizant."

Mrs. Cake's brow furrowed. Sam - for whom metaphor had, in a month or so of frequent use, become both stock in trade and terrible habit - was reminded of St. Watch-What-I-Can-Do-And-Tremble-Oh-Ye-Infidels's**(2) **parting of the Quite Greenish Sea and the subsequent reunion, which must have seemed quite pallid in comparison to the glacial-paced meeting of massive, bushy eyebrows.

"No," she said at last.

He blinked. "Sorry? Why not?"

"'E's not in the spirit world," she said. "'E's out and about. You'd 'ave better luck tryin' places 'e might be haunting than askin' me, 'cos oi'm buggered if oi know."

"_Sodomy non sapiens,"_ murmured Sam, because he was a bright lad and picking up the trappings of journalism fast. "All right. Thank you for your time, Mrs. Cake."

Farewell noises were made; he was seen out again by a shaggy silhouette in a pink dress.

"Huh," he said, to the cracked firmament. "Places he might be haunting, hmm?"

**(1) A supremely unsuccessful exercise: Sybil Ramkin had her dragons very well trained, and she wasn't about to put up with her grown son trying to pat her on the shoulder if she could possibly help it. Unhealthy, that was.**

**(2) It's shorter in Omnian. They call him St. Sesom, and grow long beards in his name(3).**

**(3). Or, well, one very small and selective sect of Omnianism does, anyhow. Small enough that the entire clan lives on Sesom-y Street, and are strictly forbidden to marry amongst themselves lest they produce children with a few too many fingernails.**

*****

On the whole, being a ghost did not agree with Vimes.

Granted, he had only been at it for a day and a half. Granted, he hadn't really gotten the opportunity to scare someone out of their skin yet, which he was looking forward to.

But he'd ended up watching the funeral, out of a perverse sort of curiosity, and that was not his idea of fun. Then he'd hung around looking awkward and wondering whether it was permissable behavior to follow his son and bawl him out to the best of his ectoplasmic capabilities for letting bloody _Vetinari _speak at his funeral.

And then he'd face the problem of finding out what the hell it was that was tethering him to the Disc.

He hoped, in a way, that it was something trivial and ludicrous; maybe that he had 'yet to reconcile with Sam's career choice', or something like that. On that basis he had attempted to float to Scoone Avenue; and finding that impractical, had proceeded home instead, ghostly truncheon in hand - though carefully, so as not to fall through the cobblestones and land flat on his back a foot deep in mucky street, which would no doubt be unpleasant, phantom though he might be.

Sam, as it turned out, wasn't in his rooms, or with his mother, or in the kitchen stealing muffins from the cook**(1). **He wasn't anywhere in the house. Or on the grounds. Or in the dragon pens (smart boy).

And Sybil hadn't been able to see him, which was depressing. On the other hand, she seemed to have been in shock. Vimes supposed he should have expected it, what with all his newly acquired spiritual wisdom, but the very idea only depressed him more.

So, having explored the rest of the old mansion - all the relevant bits, that was - and being ignored by his wife of a quarter of a century, although he supposed that was technically a bit over with now - he was wading through the garden when something occurred to drive all morose and self-pitying thoughts out of his mind. 'Something', in this case, being a goldfish.

Or rather, the ghost of a goldfish.

"Oh dear," he said, as it tumbled in a mess of silvery scales from forth the squelching mud and landed on his translucent boot.

A second flopped out of the hedge and started finning towards him through thin air, though Vimes supposed the atmosphere was so thick with rain at this point that it wasn't as implausible as it sounded.

"Damn," he said.

A third waddled on its tail over from where it had, up until this moment, been resting in apparent peace.

"What did I do to deserve this, again?" he demanded of the multiverse in general.

The fourth landed on his helmet. Vimes found himself staring into its protuberant eyes for a full five seconds before it slimed disgustingly down his nose, fell through his wrist, and hit the ground.

"Because it must have been something," he said. "This can't just be some cruel joke."

Two more materialized in his hands as he spoke.

"Can it?" he said.

And then all eighteen of his son's childhood pets' spirits, buried nearly a decade ago in this little plot by boyish hands, were raining down on his head.

**(1) Who was imperturbable, and had greeted the news of her employer's demise with a question about the type of quiches to be served at the reception. Vimes entirely approved; it was much preferable to that of the Interchangeable Emmas, who had burst into highly embarrassing and somewhat inexplicable tears.**

*****

The goldfish. It always came back to the goldfish. They had been Sam's great pride and his great shame. They numbered eighteen. They were each and every one of them dead.

Of _natural _causes.

Probably, Vimes sometimes thought, his son's eternal desire for pet goldfish was rooted in times that in some versions of his parents' Embarrassing Recollections (tm) predated the lad's earliest memories: the days of Where's My Cow?. All those animals he'd never see, as his father always said, unless on a grill. And then, one day, he'd recognized the little orange creature from the tenth page of the Greatest Story Ever Told.

It was all over, after that. Love at first sight! Don't talk about love at first sight until you've been a five-year-old realizing that some of those fantastic beasts are real, not just delicious treats to steal from the kitchen**(1).**

And then Dibbler had produced his latest game. It was a fairly simple game. You threw a pebble at the bowls of goldfish neatly laid out. If you got a pebble in a bowl, you won the bowl. And the accompanying goldfish. No refunds, though, if you, like Vimes, had the kind of throwing arm that tended to end up with a pebble very... solidly in the bowl and a brained marine specimen, because this _was _Dibbler.

Sam took after his father. Vimes remembered, fondly, how his baby boy had shattered a whole row on his very first try through a complicated domino effect, albeit with only one surviving goldfish of the lot.

He remembered, less fondly, the fuss, the tank-cleaning, the over-enthusiastic application of fish food. And the, well, the morning on which the little fish had been found floating upside down in a sea of edible debris.

Sam had tearfully borne it out back and dug it a little grave with his own two hands. Vimes had thought it sweet at the time, if unnerving.

By the sixth, he was wondering if he should have a word with the kid. By the fourteenth, he had had many words with the kid, to no effect whatsoever.

The only reason the procession had at last come to a halt was that Vetinari had banned the selling and buying of goldfish within a two-mile radius of the city after one too many... ah... _hectic... _city meeting.

He'd thought the case closed at the time. Just a youthful obsession, doncherknow, all done with now. Especially when Sybil had had the boy packed off to the Assassin's Guild and he'd gotten all twisty and educated - a fact of which Vimes was prouder than he would readily admit, but was nevertheless _intensely irritating _in light of recent events.

He'd thought. He should have known better, of course. He was an Ankh-Morpork watchman, and he'd thought that a crude, brute force measure taken by the Patrician in, well, in a state as close to desperation as Havelock Vetinari ever managed, which probably translated to a state of conscious inconvenience for the rest of humanity.

And now it was coming back to bite him in the arse. Of course. Of course. Why should he have expected otherwise? It was practically _destiny._

It was clear, at least, that hanging around what had been his house in life was serving no purpose.

"Get off me," he said, severely, to the fish hanging at various impossible angles off his spectral armor.

They fell off, one or another, and even managed a sort of very long file, although the idea of 'rank _and _file' seemed to have escaped them.

He sighed.

"Well. Come along, then."

Fish didn't exactly have any sort of coherent thought, and even less language. But ghosts have an Understanding.

Currently, his Understanding was telling him that the sentiment hanging like a brick on a wire over the fish's collective heads sang to the theme of _Yessir._

"Oh gods," he said.

Then he shrugged, and set off resignedly for Pseudopolis Yard.

**(1) An important distinction, that last. "It goes 'Sizzle'!" Sam would shout without a twinge of conscious, observing beefsteaks on the stove, but he never could stomach fried fish, to Vimes' bemusement and occasional despair.**

A/N: I didn't mean for this to be as expository as it was! But plot is coming, I promise. I just have to get the details out of the way first. Haha. Haha.


	3. Vampires Are Bastards Too

**Chapter Two: Vampires Are Bastards Too**

_In which certain things are best left unsaid and the vampire Kark Clentt earns himself two extremely unreasonable enemies with that damn curly forelock_

Prior to most of this supernatural excitement, in another part of the city entirely, Captain Carrot said a polite hello to the Palace Guard, sidestepped Drumknott and Drumknott's clipboard with expert warrant-waving**(1)** and knocked on the entrance to the Oblong Office.

"Enter," said Vetinari.

He did so, closing the door behind him.

They looked at each other in silence for a moment; Vetinari at the window, Carrot leaning over his desk slightly, hands gripping the edge.

"My lord," said Carrot, "do you remember a conversation we had, some time ago?"

"Quite a long time," said Vetinari, stepping away from the window and sitting at the desk with the kind of slow grace that arthritis and an Assassin's training - in combination - will lend a man. "Several decades, in fact."

"But you remember it."

"Of course."

"And you will... abide by it?"

"Dear me," said Vetinari, studying the broad, honest face inches from his own. "Do you mean to say, Captain, that you do not consider yourself fit to, ah, inherit Sir Samuel's position?"

"Yessir."

"Hmm. But you have been his chosen second in command for twenty-five years since you last asserted that."

"Sir."

Vetinari grinned. It was a rather odd sight, seeing a white-haired, half-blind old man, albeit an elegantly thin and sinister one, grin in the way that Vetinari was grinning. There was a suggestion of a distinct reptilian ancestry in that acidic teeth-baring, for one**(2).**

"Tell me, Captain, who would you recommend as an alternative?"

"Captain Angua von Uberwald, sir," Carrot said, promptly.

"Indeed?" said Vetinari.

Something unspoken - or, perhaps, already spoken - passed between the two.

"Well, you know the Watch better than I, Captain." He sighed. "I must admit I had expected two decades to be enough to, ah... take the edge off your... disqualifications."

"I don't want to take any chances, sir."

"No," the Patrician murmured. "Never that. But Captain Angua will be a somewhat... controversial choice."

"Mister Vimes was a somewhat controversial choice, sir, and look how well that worked out."

"Lord Rust encourages me to do so at every council meeting," Vetinari said, without inflection. "However..." He shuffled through the top strata of paperwork at his fingertips and selected one letter out of the many. "Prejudice, alas, is still rampant in our noble city, Captain. Why, a few incidents involving vampires and my desk overflows with complaints. Werewolves are not quite so widely reviled, but there are many parties who do not differentiate. Sir Samuel never did."

"I fail to see where you're going with this, sir," said Carrot.

Vetinari raised an eyebrow. "Do you really? In any case, I am merely pointing out certain unfortunate facts which Captain Angua will have to deal with, come promotion."

"She's more than capable of handling it, sir. I have great faith in her abilities."

"Fortunately for you, I have as great a faith in your judgement," said Vetinari, dryly. "Very well. Consider it done."

"Thank you, sir."

There was a tooth-suckingly silent pause as Carrot did not step away from the table and did not salute, as Vetinari did not take the black quill which had been laid aside seconds before Carrot had entered or recommence with his perusal of the numerous complaints.

"I must say, I really did expect your objections to have mellowed. It is a different city than it was," he said, instead of doing any such thing. His speech was considerably quieter than it had been, and even through the cataracts his blue eyes were intent on Carrot.

"A different shape," Carrot corrected. "Same people living in it."

"True," Vetinari conceded. "Perhaps I should say that you are a different man."

He glanced as he spoke at the man across the desk from him's greying hair, at the cheerful lines of a face accustomed to inscrutable smiles, which was, too, looser than it had been. There was even a shadow of stubble, once unthinkable to Carrot's habits of hygeine.

"Yes and no, sir," Carrot said, evenly. "I'd thought... but, well, something came up. It's - a bit to do with Angua."

"Ah," said Vetinari. "My... congratulations, Captain."

"Sir," said Carrot, gaze shifting to a point two feet up and six inches to the left of Vetinari's.

Vetinari turned a laugh into a cough as a memory of Vimes' reaction to precisely those words bubbled up; then he nodded and said, "Don't let me detain you, Captain."

Carrot smiled, sudden and bright, and tipped his helmet at Vetinari in a way that was uncharacteristically informal before he strode out.

The Patrician regarded the blank wall where he had been for a moment, and then, shaking his head, started writing a certain even more congratulatory letter to Captain Angua von Uberwald of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch.

**(1) The famous one-size-concusses-all Hammer Warrant the Watch, which, while a very modern institution, nevertheless bore traces of the... distinctive city flavor, as exemplified by the fact that when asked to produce legislature for their breaking into a given house, they **_**really enjoyed**_** brandishing the hammer in question and seeing the look on their new host's face.**

**(2) Which was not in fact Havelock Vetinari's fault, despite the many idiosyncracies of his character that might suggest otherwise. There was an unfortunate incident involving a sourcerer, very bad sherry, Wuffles' inadvisably placed teeth, and a convenient terranium, you see...**

*

Sam had _intended _to check out Pseudopolis Yard - if his father was haunting anywhere, he had a suspicion it would be there, when he was interrupted by a cloaked figure leaping in front of him and whirling its red silk-lined cloak about in a familiar fashion.

"Samuel!" said Otto, pulling him bodily off the street and into the _Times' _office a few yards away.

"Ow," complained Sam, rubbing the back of his head and glaring at the iconographer, who he had become friendly with in the intermittent weeks between his becoming a journalist and the present time, but who he was currently not feeling very friendly towards at all. There was going to be a bruise on his skull, come morning. Probably a lump, too, with his luck**(1).** "What did you do that for?"

"I vant you to meet someone," said Otto.

"Wha -"

"I think you vill get along very vell!" the vampire added, with the enthusiasm of the extremely anxious.

"Fine, but who -"

"Good evening," said someone, unpeeling from the wall.

They were in the back of the press room, and Sam felt suddenly exposed; although there was busy activity in copious amounts only ten feet away, he had a feeling that the muscular vampire standing in front of him could probably break his neck without any of the chattering dwarves so much as looking up.

He comforted himself that Otto would probably object.

But it was more than the muscle tone. _Any _vampire could break his neck in an instant, no matter how scrawny; in many he had encountered, particularly while on the job, there had been an obvious motive, too. This one was not even half as menacing, technically, as some. He was tall and broad and handsome, in a disturbingly chiseled sort of way, as monochromatic as most vampires, his shiny black hair curling to a point at the center of his forehead, which was unnerving, true, but shouldn't have been scary.

It was. As was the rest of it, down to the smart grey highly unvampiric suit. And the square spectacles _on a ribbon oh gods oh gods it was on a black ribbon and that wasn't an emblem that was bloody annoying._ And the teeth, of which even the canines gleamed wholesomely. The teeth, which were visible because of the smirk.

If there was such a thing as hate at first sight, Sam realized, with a kind of dizzy astonishment, this was it. He generally got along with people. It was clear that, in this case, that cause was not only lost but stamped upon and buried and had probably decomposed into wormfood and become part of the Great Cycle Of Nature and helped some witch fill some not-quite-innocent's bones with hot lead, so little a chance was there of its being resurrected.

"Er," he managed, at last. "Hi."

"Hi there," said the vampire, gravely. There was the voice, too. It was patronizing. It suggested that here was the puppet master, and you were the puppet.

"Samuel, this is Kark Clentt," said Otto. "He's, ah, a friend of a friend, new to zer city."

"Not Uberwaldean?" said Sam, having noted the lack of an accent somewhere in the middle of his revelation of totally unjust and totally irrevocable bias.

"Ah, no," said Otto, even more uncomfortably. "Not precisely. And he is an Ankh-Morpork citizen now."

"Right," said Sam, exasperated. "_Obviously. _Otto, what the hells is going on?"

Kark's lips twitched. Irritatingly. "It's a fair question, Otto. I haven't been enlightened as to the answer, myself."

"Oh, vell," said Otto, "I just thought, as Sam is in your, ah, business, he could show you zer ropes. You said you vere looking for a guide? Also he knows the city very vell, I am sure he vill be happy to show you around, you see?"

"Not really," said Sam, at the same time as Kark said, with, if Sam was not mistaken, definite menacing undercurrents, "Of course, of course! Very kind of you, Mister Samuel."

Sam gave him a sickly smile. "Well - I - if you like, I suppose I could -"

"That would be wonderful!" the vampire enthused. Sam wondered whether it was acceptable friendly journalist chum behavior to back away slowly, and reluctantly decided against it.

"Er, but I'm afraid I'm not off until eight tonight," he said. "I have a bit of a story to cover. After that it should be fine. Er."

"Capital," said the vampire, with added jocularity and teeth to it. Bastard, thought Sam.

"And now I really should speak to Otto about, er, this unfortunate business with the latest attempt at moving iconographs vis a vis my article," he said. "Sorry. All hours on the job, you know how it is."

"No, actually," said Kark. "That is what you are going to teach me, after all."

"Oh? Oh. Yes. Right," said Sam, and sidled a little nearer to the relative safety of the busy dwarves. "Um. Otto?"

"Yes?" said Otto, who had been watching glumly.

"Talk, can we, now."

"Yes," said Otto. Glumly.

"I'll leave you to it, then, shall I?" inquired Kark.

"Yes, please," said Sam, feeling the hysteria begin to bubble up in his throat. "We can, uh, meet up later. Is the Mended Drum good for you?"

"Oh, very," said Kark.

"Right then."

Otto and he watched the vampire saunter off, hands in finely-tailored pockets.

"_What the hell is wrong with him?_" hissed Sam, as soon as he was out of the room. He was twitching; every nerve in his body wanted to do the tango, and possibly the sisal two-step for good measure. There had been something deeply, deeply off about Kark.

"It is a long story..." Otto started.

"I lied about the job, I'm on leave for Grievances and Emotional Unrest**(2)**," Sam snapped. "And I _know _that you were planning on spending this day with your imps, so don't claim you don't have the time -"

"I vas not going to," said Otto. "That vas just a varning. Mm. Vill you come down to the cellars to hear it?"

"What? Why?"

"Ve have an audience," said Otto.

Sam whirled around on his heel, and caught a glimpse of one laggard dwarf's beard before she'd**(4)** finished pretending to have been at her work the whole time. Plus, _all _of the others had their backs to him, which was unnatural. "Ah."

"Qvite," said Otto.

"All right, then."

They went the back way and descended into Otto's darkroom, where salamanders crackled softly to themselves and the eels made weird sizzling noises on the lower shelves. Otto spent a moment crooning to the imps, illuminated as unDiscly patches of color where the salamanders flared, before turning back to Sam.

"Please sit down," he said, gesturing to a handy stool. Sam sat. The stool creaked ominously. There was a general suggestion of precarious and probationary truce between his weight and the strength of the ricket wooden legs in the air.

Otto did not follow his own advice, electing instead to stand dramatically in the doorway. "Tell me... Have you ever heard of an entrepeneur named Voose Brayne?"

"Er, no," said Sam.

"He vas a friend of mine," said Otto.

"That's, uh, nice?"

"A few months ago a vampire transformed him, you understand?"

"Oh."

"Yes, _oh. _He comes to me for transference - not immediately, no, first he goes off to do mysterious things in zer heart of Ubervald. And zen he comes to me vith a ridiculous plan and makes me promise to keep it a secret."

"What was the plan?"

"Did you not hear me just now vhen I said I vas made to promise to keep it a secret?" Otto snapped. "It had to do vith his desired obsession, that is all I can tell you. And vunce the procedure vas done vith he buggered off, but he leaves me a message asking me to help out this vampire Kark, as a favor to him, when he arrives, new to zer city. And I say yes."

"So you don't know what's wrong with him," said Sam, with a sinking heart.

"No. And vhat unnerves me about zer business is zat everyvun here takes to him immensely but for you and me. Even Villiam takes to him! It is unnatural, zey might as vell be brainvashed!"

Sam blinked at that. "You don't just mean he was polite, do you? Because Mr. de Worde -"

"He vas rude! And jovial! _Villiam de Vorde."_

"We're knee-deep in cack, huh," said Sam.

"Vaist-deep, I suspect." Otto sighed. "I do not know. Perhaps it is not his fault, he is new to Temperance, and it is very hard. But he seems to me a little mad, and that is vorrying, in a vampire; and he seems to me very clever, vhich is more vorrying, in anyvun, but especially in a vampire."

"Yeah, and maybe I'm just repelled because I'm my father's son. Haha. Haha."

"Vell, that _is _vhy I went to you," said Otto.

"It is? Oh. Right. I should have guessed."

"And I vas apparently correct in my surmise," the iconographer continued, oblivious to Sam's sudden discomfort.

"Yes. Yes, indeed."

"Then you see vhy I vanted you to keep an eye on him?"

"What? No! What am I supposed to do if something goes wrong? Kick him in the shins? He's a bloody great vampire!"

"I think he vill be... subtler than that, if he really is planning something ve should be vorried about," said Otto.

"Yeah. We're probably just being silly. Obviously," said Sam. "Right? Yes?"

"No doubt," said Otto, in as kind a voice as he could manage. "Ve are just being cautious."

"Right. Right," said Sam.

"Vhich is vhy you are going to endeavor not to let him out of your sight, yes? Because ve are being cautious."

"Right."

"And if he tries anyzing, not zat I think he vill try anything, ve are only being cautious, I cautiously recommend you use silver, it is faster zan garlic by far."

"All right, all right, Otto, I get the point. Look, in my case it's just blind prejudice kicking in, yeah, but - is there more I should know about this Voose Brayne fellow?"

"Nothing vhatsoever," said Otto, and firmly steered him back up the stairs.

Sam watched him disappear back through the trap door, considered the itinerary for the day, and groaned.

Well, fine. He had until eight. It was two in the afternoon now. Plenty of time! All the time in the world to find his father's tormented spirit, have a bit of a chat with it about not scaring the dickens out of him, and come up with a plan of action to deal with some incredibly convenient vampire who was almost certainly - Sam was familiar, by now, with how Narrative Convention thought, which was to say, in unpleasant and predictable ways - going to try to kill someone in an exciting fashion before the week was up.

Besides, there was a quite large part of Sam's brain that really did think it was all a bit of exaggeration on his and Otto's part. They were good at exaggeration. They were working for the _Times! _Nothing they interpreted based off scant information should be trusted.

And if the _rest _of his brain was somewhere between gibbering with terror and punching someone's head in, well... everyone had their Little Moments.

Right.

Thinking thusly, he strolled out into the street and totally failed to see the cart as it came rattling towards him.

**(1) In fact, had he but known it, the hilariously pink and conical lump that would, indeed have swollen up by morning was not the result of the Lady's attentions at all but was yet another unfortunate side effects of Narrative Convention and Comic Regulations within the multiverse, which are legion.**

**(2) For some reason, merely waking up and realizing very sensibly that the world is out to get you on this particular Thursday(3) does not count as Emotional Unrest **_**or **_**a Grievance. The death of your mad Aunt Hattie, who beat you as a child, however, is perfectly good reason for you to bugger off and get celebratorily drunk. This is an inexplicable phenomenon that has more than is healthy to do with serious men wearing very thin watches.**

**(3) It's always a Thursday.**

**(4) Sam was quite good at differentiating between genders, with dwarves. It was easier these days, true, but still, he prided himself on his ability to spy the most inconspicuous of ribbons braided into a gorsebush beard.**

A/N: The unfunny had to kick in at some point. Also, I fail at underhanded pop culture references, I do, I do.


	4. A Death Threat Always Has An Audience

**Chapter Three: A Death Threat Always Has An Appreciative Audience**

_In which our hero almost gets run over by a cart and unborn children are discussed at length, the inconvenient little buggers  
_

Sam turned, journalist's instincts kicking in at the last minute, just in time to see the cart hurtling toward him.

He lunged, knowing it was too little too late -

And was bowled over into safety against the side of the building by what looked like, from his speed-blurred perspective, a pink and blue beachball.

"Ggnh," he mumbled, sitting up from where he had been slammed against the curb and rubbing his ribs. The cart had driven straight into the wall of a fortunately abandoned and crumbling boardinghouse, the horses looking even madder than was normal for horses as they neighed and kicked their way out of the boards and wreck of the reins, and a somewhat familiar figure in, yes, blue and pink was haranguing the dazed driver.

Also, it appeared that about a tenth of Ankh-Morpork's total population had formed a curious ring around the scene of havoc and carnage. Sam didn't blame them. Had his vision not been wavering and full of pulsating dark spots, he would have had his notebook out. As it was, he tried to stop looking at his own nose and get a grip on himself. From what he could make out, though, it was quite a scene, a tableau of marvels – most miraculous of which being that the cart's driver wasn't even haranguing back!

Sam was dimly conscious that, had he been taking this down, there would have been several more exclamation points tagged on to that statement.

He also would have been trying to decide whether or not this was a rumpus.

"Ladies and gentlemen!" said his pink-and-blue savior, at last turning from his business of working the impossible on an Ankh-Morporkian citizen – eking out some measure of guilt and repentance. The driver was staring at his toes, for heavens' sake.

"Who're you speaking to, mister?" said a wag in the crowd.

"You, gentle cityfolk! See how crime has been relegated here and rejoice!"

There was a suspicious silence hanging over the head of the gentle cityfolk. Sam squinted at the towering man, whose foot was about a yard from his aching head, and wondered what Captain Carrot was doing in that ridiculous suit. It didn't _look _like Captain Carrot at all, actually, but it sure as hell sounded like him.

"It's only Ernie, mister," one of the braver ones in the back ventured. "'E's no criminal. Worl, not much of one, anyhow."

The pink-and-blue thing ignored him, too. "No longer need you fear insidious evil in your great city! I am here! I will protect you, from now on!"

And the thing was, thought Sam, muzzily – no one was shouting 'Yeah!' or throwing rotten potatoes**(1). **Which was worrying. Very worrying indeed.

It was almost as if they were listening.

"Until next time, fair people!" cried the humanoid form in pink and blue. "Until next time!"

And then it leapt, and rose, and flew, legs bent at an awkward angle just as they had been when he kicked off, one sticking out, one drawn up in a sort of rough 'four' shape. Its pink cape streamed out dramatically behind it.

"Garn," said someone, in the crowd.

Possibly a _fracas, _thought Sam, and passed out.

**(1) Rotten potatoes are more amusing to throw at people than rotten tomatoes, being harder, heavier, and more likely to have pointy things sticking out of the side. Some linguists even theorize that these pointy things are called 'eyes' after the very organ they have the greatest probability of injuring during their brief existence after the potato in question has been left in the cupboard for a few too many years. This is one explanation for the choice of projectile; the other is just that Ankh-Morpork citizens, as a single entity, can't spell to save their collective life(2).**

**(2) And certainly wouldn't**** even _try _to save anyone else's life by doing so. Or, as the case might be, eye. Um.**

*

"Letter for you, Cap'n," said Mrs. Cake, some several hours later.

Angua, who was currently golden-furred and four-legged, not to mention curled up in the pillowy depths of her wicker basket, gave her landlady a hostile glance. Her landlady, with the kind of imperturbability that comes only after a good half a century browbeating ghosts (not an easily browbeaten species) and considerable psychic gifts, ignored this, and set the white envelope on the table.

"You ort to take a little more care about this room, you know," she added, for good measure, eyeing her wolfish lodger. "It's a regular pigsty in here. What did you do, claw off the wallpaper? Don't answer, oi knows what we agreed, oi'm only saying."

Angua woofed out air through her long snout in the fashion of large hairy sprawling dogs everywhere and managed a passable nod, for a person of canine persuasion.

"Well, all right, then," said Mrs. Cake. "Oi'll just leave you to it, shall oi? It looks very important, dun't it," she added. "Wiv that official seal, 'n all."

Angua made a noise in the back of her throat that was somewhere between the sound of a motor gunning and a rat moggy's purr.

"Oi'll just be going now, then," said Mrs. Cake. "You take good care of yourself, mind. Don't want anything happening to the pups, now, do you?"

Angua made a sound that had a lot more in common with shadows and glowing eyes than any mere engine. Mrs. Cake, oblivious, went on, "But at least the worst of it's over, what with the morning sickness being done with, and all. It gave me quite a fright, oi tell you, seeing them feathers in the privy!"

Angua gave up and sighed the sigh of the well and truly browbeaten undead.

"Right then," said Mrs. Cake, triumphant, and marched out, dragging her huge red handbag behind her.

As soon as she was gone, Angua uncoiled – a lengthy process involving much detangling of graceful, shaggy legs and, for some reason, tail-chasing – from her resting place among the tartan-wrapped**(1) **cushions and padding out of the moonlight pouring in through a crack in the (tartan) curtains draped across the thick, leaded glass of the window.

Then she Changed. The narrator will make no attempt to describe this, since it would only result in unfortunate publicity and the readers with particularly delicate constitutions trying to claw their own eyeballs out. If you really require at least a grace nod in the direction of proper imagery, picture a sneeze, extremely close up.

Now imagine the same process, as carried out not by an enormous nose but by an attractive woman.

Once finished, she stretched, put on a bathrobe**(2), **and slit open the envelope. A careless bystander might have assumed she was holding a letter opener; a more observant passerby would have heard just the slightest suggestion of a 'scritch' as the metallic glint disappeared into her hand, in almost the exactly the way cats resheath their claws. No wolf in the history of history had ever done it, but lycanthropes, of course, had certain… advantages when it came to removable bits of themselves.

It took her five seconds to realize that she was slitting through familiar black wax, and that the halved seal bore two portions of a capital V.

"Oh, damn," she said, removing the letter absently, hands working as if on automatic. The paper was heavy and cream-colored and stiff; her mind filed away the little facts, as she had learned in twenty-five years working for the Watch – not Clues, never Clues, you couldn't trust Clues further than you could throw them**(3)**, just the details that had to be seen and memorized until Forensics could get their horny dwarfish hands on them.

The _words, _she told herself. This is not a case. Focus on the _writing. _You know. The little squiggly black stuff?

_Captain Delphine Angua von Uberwald, I am pleased to inform you of your promotion to the rank of Commander, as is only appropriate based on your superior capabilities and performance during the entirety of your service in the Ankh Morpork City Watch…_

There was a lot more of it. And, at the end, a signature.

Angua blinked, refolded the letter, slipped it back into the envelope, wedged the envelope between her gritted teeth, and wondered if it would be appropriate for her first act as Commander V- Commander _Angua, _she thought, her mind slipping hysterically over the internal error - of the Watch to be execution of the man she knew was behind this.

It wasn't bloody Vetinari, that was for sure, scheming though he was. Oh, no.

Mister Vimes would probably find it funny, she thought, glumly, as she undid the belt of her robe and Changed back, the better to go to the Watch House and rip a very specific someone's throat out. The old bastard. He had to go and die on us right then, did he? Probably giving some god hell in, er, his own private, well, hell, and _snickering_ at me. Damn, damn, damn.

She trotted out through the flap at knee-level installed into her door, down the stairs, and out into the moonlit streets. In the glow of the full moon, even the cobblestones of Morpork shone like corroded silver, and stank of rich… pungent fragrances that wafted up in shades of gold and umber and bile green.

If Vetinari didn't revoke his bleeding offer once she'd had one of her fellow officer's head off and jugular out, she'd never walk these streets on the beat properly again.

It wasn't that Angua was some sort of sentimental old copper who loved her city, or somesuch. Certainly not.

Not even a little bit.

Not even a _smidgen._

But... well...

With the litany of denial ringing in her now grapefruit-sized lupine brain she arrived at the Yard, which was surprisingly quiet at this time of night. She didn't know what time it was; probably one or two in the morning, the moon high in its arc. Somewhere else, this might have qualified as the witching hour, but on the whole witches were sensible enough to avoid Ankh-Morpork like the plague.

The very man she was searching for awaited her in his room, still rented, after all these years, one story up from the bustling police headquarters, and smiled when she came in.

"Hello, Angua."

There was a brief and busy pause during which he politely averted his eyes. When he turned his head, she was human and wore a loose tunic they kept by for emergencies.

"Arruh Iruhodder –" she began, and then spat out the letter held between her jaws, which she crumpled into a vague rattling club-shape and shook in front of his face.

"Carrot Ironfoundersson, you are a _dead _man!"

"No, I'm not," said Carrot, brow furrowing.

"You bloody well will be!"

"_Oh_." His forehead smoothed out, the latest puzzle presented by normal human communication being resolved. Alas, the pleasing result was ruined when he went cross-eyed trying to read the paper being waved under his large and Tsortean**(4)** nose.

"_You _were supposed to be Commander," she snarled, when it became clear that they were getting nowhere by following tradition. Carrot had no sense of dramatic timing whatsoever; just another of Angua's regrets in having entered a steady relationship with a dwarf. She had been born and bred**(5) **in the most psychotropic landscape on the Disc, and though on the whole she dealt with the more… permissive atmosphere to be found in the city, it got a bit much at times.

"I was?" said Carrot, mildly. "So that's it. What's wrong? I thought you'd be pleased."

"Aha!"

"Would have thought, I mean," he amended.

"You thought wrong. I can't be Commander!"

"Why not?"

That brought her up short, but only for a heartbeat. "I'm a werewolf!"

"You've never let that stop you before."

"I've never been asked to take command of the entire bloody Watch before, either!"

He looked puzzled. "But surely this is just a matter of scaling up?"

"I – but – anyway!" she snapped, recovering herself, "it's not just that. I don't want to be Commander, it'd be far too much work, I'd soon go mad and then where would we be? With a murderous werewolf in charge of the only body of armed men in the city, that's where."

"No, we wouldn't," said Carrot. Angua paused.

"Maybe not," she said, "but that doesn't make me any happier about the prospect. I can't handle leadership! I wasn't cut out for officering!"

Carrot tried to fight down the sudden memories of Sergeant – at the time, Acting Captain – Colon, a clean desk, an overflowing fireplace, and far too many sugar cubes in neat rows that would have taxed any man's sanity; even Carrot's dubious supply of the latter quality, which was saying something, since Carrot had little enough sanity to tax, and what of it there was took the same view towards taxation as the average Morporkian citizen and/or a small pile of mouse droppings, that is, one so dim it was positively inky.

"Angua," he said gently, "you _are _an officer. You have been for nearly twenty years, remember?"

Angua deflated, but persevered. "That was different. I was an honorary sergeant, Mister Vimes promoted me because he gets – got – embarrassed about having only one captain and a lot of competent sergeants."

"Mister Vimes certainly wouldn't want someone who was cut out for officering officering," said Carrot, trying a different tack.

"Damn straight," said Vimes' shade, who had just walked in. Through the wall. His two former employees ignored him. He rolled his eyes and leaned back to watch the fun.

"He'd want _you _officering," said Angua. "Look, why are you doing this?"

"Are you keeping healthy?" said Carrot. "Eating properly? Making sure not to go on beat with Nobby?"

"Carrot, this is _not _the time to be concerned about your unborn children, this is the time to be concerned about your soul, because once I'm done with you –" she began, in one long explosion of sound, and then, very abruptly, came to a screeching halt.

"Yes," said Carrot. "Exactly."

"There really is a roundabout that doesn't get around to me in these conversations, isn't there," said Vimes, conversationally, to the goldfish ringing his head.

"You don't – we don't – they won't –" Angua tried, aware that she and Carrot had never, as it were, articulated their concerns about… well… his krisma, and associated problems. At the moment, it seemed like a very serious oversight indeed.

"I can't be certain," he said, his voice softer and more ordinary than before.

"But I'm hardly a safer choice, am I? I'm the, the mother –"

Carrot grimaced. "Safer than me, and there's no one else, there never was. Please, Angua."

"Damn you," she said. "Fine. I'll do it. You had better be bloody grateful."

"See?" he said encouragingly. "You're getting the hang of it already."

"I wasn't trying to imitate Mister –" she started, then gave up, blasphemed at some length and incoherently to any listening gods, and hurried out of the room.

"I think that went rather well," said Carrot.

"Are you talking to me?" said Vimes.

"All things considered," the six-foot-six dwarf went on, and returned to what he had been doing before Angua's eventful entrance, which was writing a letter to his mum. There was a pause as the ghost of his former commander peered hopefully over his shoulder, and read:

_Dear Mume and Dadd, I am, sorry to say that..._

"All right, so you weren't talking to me," Vimes muttered. "No need to be like that about it, I get the message, don't mind me. Not that you are. Minding me. At all. In the slightest. I bet you wouldn't even notice if I rattled chains at you."

Carrot went on blithely applying punctuation where no punctuation ever ought to have been applied.

"You could at least make an effort, you know," said Vimes, bitterly.

Carrot dabbed at an enormous tear rolling down his nose as he described the funeral. With lots of commas.

"Not that kind of effort."

Carrot licked his pencil lead, deep in contemplation, in the precious space afforded by a misplaced period before plunging into the next though.

"Fine. Fine! And the same to you. A lifetime of service, I don't know…" He trailed off into indignant mumbling.

And then he dissolved through the woodwork, and the only sound in the room was the scratching of a pencil and the last of the goldfish, which made sympathetic blubbing noises before following its new leader.

**(1) A present from Carrot for the anniversary of the day they had first… caught and slaughtered a dangerous criminal between them. Very romantic, all the same, and she hadn't had the heart to explain to him that tartan, even on comfy swandown pillows that reminded her all too much of illicit chickens in the night, was about as fashionable as Mister Vimes' tights, poor man.**

**(2) Which was tartan. Dr. Cruces had been dead for twenty years, and Carrot was a conscientious, if somewhat… single-minded Er Um.**

**(3) i.e., not at all, since that would be Tampering With The Evidence.**

**(4) It may possibly have been Ephebian; the narrator can never remember which one is the one with the little bump in it and which is the one with the pointy tip. Carrot's was the large sort with the bump in. Possibly.**

**(5) To the finest pedigree imaginable.**

*****

A/N: Do you know, some reviewer of my other fics had the nerve to say I used too many footnotes. I can't imagine what they could have meant at all! There's no helping some people.


	5. Loving Goldfish Is For Life

**Chapter Four: Loving Goldfish Is For Life  
**

_In which all the Sam Vimeses in the vicinity have a heart-to-memory-of-a-heart, and the Right. Hon. Possibly Sir Angua contemplates titling practices in her city_**  
**  
When Samuel came to, it was either very late or very, very early, judging by the amount of light filtering through his bedroom window, which was to say, judging by the fact that there was not actually any light whatsoever filtering through his bedroom window. Also, by the fact that the inside of his mouth did not taste like glue and a tiny dead animal, which meant he had been _sleeping, _not just... unconscious-ing. No.

Of course, the fact that the drapes were shut, he realized, as he sat up in bed and ran his hand along the wall to the window, probably didn't help. He tugged them apart and winced as moonlight spilled across the blanket over his knees, almost blindingly brilliant after the pitch darkness that had preceded it.

While his eyes were adjusting, he took stock. He was warm, in pyjamas that were one size too small for him and distressingly familiar, and although his head and ribs were still throbbing, the ache had dulled in the interlude and cold, squishy poultices had been applied to various sensitive areas. Which meant his mother had taken him home. And it was still, in all probability, either very late or very, very early.

On the bright side, he thought sourly, at least he didn't have to go to dinner with the bloody vampire. Who knew that almost getting run over by a cart and then being slammed into the pavement by some madman in pink and blue had its good points?

Well. He did. Obviously. But besides that!

Because rambling on in his own head was irritating, he groped somewhat less blindly than he had for the lamp by his bed and, after a few false starts and one singed thumb, managed to light the wick. A flame bloomed up from the pool of oil at bottom, and he hissed out his held breath triumphantly. Then he felt a bit silly and tried to look nonchalant, and _then _he remembered that there was no one around to see him being an idiot and, by way of resolution for all these confused revelations, hit himself over the head, which unwise move shot a considerably sharper pain through his much abused skull. Also, his outflung elbow knocked over the lamp, and while the fire did not spill humorously all over the inflammable wood, it did go out.

"Bad time?" said a familiar voice, as he shut his eyelids tightly and fell back against the headboard.

It was a _very _familiar voice. His eyes flew open again.

His father was standing perhaps two feet away from his head, on the other side of the nightstand, slouching in traditional off-duty watchman fashion and looking terribly amused. Outlined as he was in glinting blue and grey, like everything else in the silvery gloom, he appeared exactly as he had when alive. He even had an unlit cigar clenched between his teeth.

Sam tried very hard not to have a (most improbable, given his age) heart attack, and squinted at the old man. Not so very old, to tell the truth, not in this light and... corporeality. Though his father could have been solid flesh and blood, from where Sam... lay..., when he had, in fact, been solid flesh and blood he had been a lot wrinklier. It was odd to see Vimes like this, upright**(1) **and, if not muscled, at least sinewy, wearing a grin designed to scare the living dickens out of anyone who saw it with contextual knowledge. Haha. Ahaha. Oh gods. He'd thought seeing him at the funeral was bad enough, but this was much, much worse. And yet there was a part of him - the part of him that was five years old and short for its age - that was overwhelmed by relief to see that general outline, even if the details were disconcerting.

"Er," he said at last, intelligently. "Yes, very."

"Sorry," said Vimes, not sounding very sorry - was that a _fish _the man was clutching in one hand. It was. A goldfish, to be specific. "Just wanted to check up on you, you know. There was a bit of a fuss earlier. Your -" he spat the next word "- _coworkers _brought you over, that Otto chap seemed practically hysterical, kept muttering about how he should never have set you on... Clentt, was it? Or maybe it was that he should never have set Clentt on _you, _I wasn't quite clear on that part, or, you know, at all. Care to fill me in?"

Sam blinked. "Look, I - we thought Clentt seemed like a bit of a shady character, and I was supposed to show him the ropes, only then I almost got hit by a cart."

"Almost?" said Vimes, taking the ghostly cigar out of his mouth and gesturing at the lump on Sam's forehead with it.

"Yes, almost. 'Cos after _that _I was hit by someone pushing me out of the way of the cart. It was impressive, really. Superhuman speed and whatnot, I suppose it must have been one of those nice community-oriented undead -"

Vimes choked on his cigar just as he was replacing it between the morphic resonance of his former teeth.

"- although it was wearing a costume that was really very odd," said Sam. "Pink and blue, I think, and there was a cape involved, which was silly under the circumstances, might have gotten caught in the wheels, and all."

"A pink and blue costume," said Vimes, flatly.

"Yes."

"My gods," said Vimes, and set the cigar on fire. A cloud of smoke rose off it, and Sam turned his head out of habit, then sniffed the air and realized that while certain perceptions can be sustained post-mortem, true odor is not one of them. Thank the bloody gods; he was accustomed to it himself, but the image of his first girlfriend's shock as a puff of burning-cabbage scent blew past her was etched into his memory. "Well, all right then. You're going to look into this business about the 'community-oriented undead', I expect?"

"Of course. And Clentt too, if I can."

"Right, right. For the _Times, _I expect," said Vimes, glumly. Sam nodded. "If you must."

There was an awkward pause. His father seemed to be wrestling with himself. At last he went on, "You do know, lad, that I don't..." he ground out the words "...object... to... your... career choice, right? I'm just happy you got a job -"

"Thank you," said Sam.

"- that's not what I meant. I mean. Sure, it's not what I'd been hoping for, I never saw myself raising a journalist for a son, but there's nothing _wrong _with it, I guess, so long as you don't become a pompous twit or a hack or one of those fellows who respond to Letters to the Editor, because you have to admit they're a park short of a picnic, or, you know, like those old ladies, the ones who write about how young folk these days ought to be whipped, but of course you couldn't, because you're not, well, a lady, although I understand there's some new techno-whatsits these days that means that if you, er, _wanted _to be -"

"Dad!" said Sam, laughing despite himself. "You weren't seriously worried about that? I knew you'd be - well, you'd get over it eventually when I went to get the job. More or less. At least, I hoped so, and I never thought that you hadn't." Except for that one moment when the steam started coming out of your ears, he added, in the privacy of his own mind, because he had been raised to honesty, one of his early education**(2)**'s few faults, impressed upon him too early for even the Assassins' Guild's happy influence to correct it.

"Oh," said Vimes. "Well. Good."

"Right, then," said Sam.

Vimes stuck his hands in his pockets and fidgeted. Sam waited politely. At last, when it became apparent that nothing was going to happen without his input, he inquired, "Are you all right?"

"Godsdamn it," Vimes muttered, "I really thought that was it." Then, louder: "You know that there's some... unfinished business that must be keeping me here, yes?"

"Yeah," said Sam, "I went to see Mrs. Cake, she did say."

"Ah. Right, right. And all I could come up with was your becoming a journalist and -"

"An unfinished case?" said Sam, who was developing a sense for the way things worked in the horrible black comedy that was destined to be his _entire life, _from the course it had taken so far.

"Yep," said Vimes. "Involving, funnily enough, an undead displaying most... un-undeadish, haha, behavior, if you know what I mean. Dressed up in a strange costume, too. Got to a robbery before we did and murdered all the robbers, which was a shame, since otherwise we would have just named it vigilante action and called it a day. I'm surprised you don't know all this already - it made the front page, of course, de Worde being the -"

He bit down on the last word. Sam couldn't resist a tiny smirk. "I think I must have skimmed over that one," he said, replaying the description in his head. "So it was the same... man? Pink and blue -"

"No," said Vimes. "Different costume, solid black, this one, at least the bastard's got a touch of style, Angua always says it's embarrasing, chasing the really whacked ones who think paisley is perfect for the recovering depressed. Like that interior decorator, ugh."

"Dad? Dad!" said Sam, waving a hand in front of Vimes' spectral face.

"Sorry. Where was I? Yes, the costume was different, black. Except for the belt. The belt was a really **  
**unfortunate shade of yellow, so perhaps he was a bit whacked after all. And there was a bat sigil on it, and he had pointy things sticking out of his head -"

"Horns, Dad," Sam said patiently.

"I don't know about that," said Vimes. "Maybe they were, maybe they weren't. Hard to tell, in get-up like that. Anyway, sadly for us, it wasn't the same costume, though I s'pose it's possible it was the same criminal in different mad dress, anything's possible with lunatics, right?"

"True," said Sam, and then changed the subject to something that had been niggling him since he'd noticed it. "Are you holding a goldfish?"

Vimes' face went wooden. "Possibly," he said.

"It's one of mine, isn't it," said Sam, with a certain resignation to what the gods had in store for him.

"Possibly," said Vimes.

"You don't have to hide it, Dad. I got over them. Really. I did."

"Hmph," said Vimes, but he unfolded his hand, and Sam saw the twitching silver ghost of Orangino II**(3).**

"Oh," he said, in a small voice, and tried to take the limp little body. His fingers went straight through, and came out on the other side of Vimes' palm, which was, to say the least, disconcerting.

His father stuck two fingers in his mouth and whistled. The seventeen others followed in short order, and stared at him, with big, loving, bulgy goldfish eyes.

"Oh," said Sam, in an even smaller voice.

"Don't take it too hard, lad," said Vimes, in as kind a voice as he could manage.

"No," Sam agreed, but his gaze was locked on that of his erstwhile pets, and Vimes was well aware that hope of a more reasonable treatment was well and truly up the Ankh without an oar**(5).**  
**  
(1) For a given value of upright, that was, most of that value being propped up against a handy wall.**

**(2) An excellent one courtesy of Miss Susan and a few judicious timeskips. Ah, the supernatural good childhood times. Ah, the roof-raising arguments between parent and teacher over details like the bauble he'd brought back from another universe with the bright blue glow and the tentacles.**

**(3) So named for the intense orange shade of its scales and its general rotundity, which only grew until the day it died of malnutrition(4). Young Sam might have had almost as many virtues as his father, and considerably more intelligence than the latter, but creativity was not his forte. Or even his foible. There wasn't a Quirmian word for what creativity was to him, unless you counted the ones inappropriate to use around small children.**

**(4) As Famine told Death modestly later, stroking his black goatee, when they were having a drink together in one those bars with all the mysterious little umbrellas, it was the irony in the details that counted, and besides, there was no way to make fish food that consisted totally of sugar and fat **_**not funny**_**.  
**  
**(5) Not that an oar would have been useful up the Ankh in any case, unless one had a shovel as part of the matched set. And really thick boot soles.**

*

"What do you want, my lord?" Angua snapped, striding into the Office while the door slammed shut behind her. She was even more annoyed than before; a troll from the Palace Guard had seen fit, after all, to direct _her _to an unscheduled appointment with the Patrician.

The fact that these were likely to be a much larger portion of her work in the near future did not improve her mood a whit, either.

"Ah, Commander," said Vetinari, looking up in the direction of her voice. It was unsettling to be stared at by someone who she knew - all the more emphatically, thanks to her special gifts - was seeing her as a fuzzy outline, more or less. "Kind of you to be so prompt; I apologize for interrupting your evening. I merely thought I should inform you of something I neglected to detail fully in the official letter."

"Sir?" she said, aware that she had been overdoing the brusqueness and that, from the very slight hint of testiness in her employer's voice, if she kept on like she had started she would be risking pointed and Patrician sarcasm aimed in her highly specific direction.

He paused and glanced down at the papers in front of him, seeming to weigh his words for a moment, which was a rare sight. Out of some ingrained instinct, she tried to read the papers in question upside down, and got as far as II (a) ii) 1) before being interrupted by the dry, quiet voice.

"You will no doubt recall that the late Commander Vimes was elevated to knighthood when he was promoted," he said, at last.

"Yes, of course," said Angua, without thinking. Then: "Oh gods."

"Quite so," Vetinari agreed. "I suspected there might be some difficulty about modifying that... traditional gift with your, ah, gender accounted for, but to my surprise the regulations are clear on the matter. Excessively so, in fact." The faintest suggestion of a line formed between his eyebrows for a moment as he glanced down again. "Despite there never having been a female Commander of the Watch in the history of any city on the Disc, let alone Ankh-Morpork. Ever. Somewhat inexplicable, then, how much detail was gone into. I am - _happy _to say that as it turns out you will, in your turn, be elevated to an identical position of knighthood, Commander."

"Identical?" Angua said, incredulously. "What, you mean sir and tights and lands and a - a_nother _entry in Twerp's Peerage and a lineage, and so on?"

Vetinari coughed. "The tights were, in fact, a part of the ducal ensemble, not the knightly one," he said. "But otherwise - _yes, _Commander. Or shall I say - Sir Angua. Aha. Aha."

"Please don't, sir," she said, fervently. "My nerves can't take it. Why? Do those chivalry codes and city statutes _really _say -"

"You may see for yourself," he said, turning the paper around and pushing it towards her, "although I expect you will have gathered some of it from your topsy-turvy efforts."

She did not blush - there were some things she could thank her werewolf metabolism for - but it was a close thing.

A contemplative silence fell as he stood and walked to the window while she read.

"Rather frantic handwriting, sir, that last bit**(1)**," she said, when she was finished being gobsmacked.

"Indeed."

"A touch spidery."

"Yes."

"The sort of handwriting induced by too much time spent indoors, one feels...?" she tried, hopefully.

"An intriguing observation, Commander, but alas irrelevant under the circumstances," he said, his voice distant.

"Damn," she said, under her breath, and then sighed. "If there's no help for it... was that all you wanted, sir?"

"Since you are here," Vetinari replied, turning back away from the window, "perhaps an informal report would be in order, Commander? Unless you have other business to attend to."

"No," she said, grateful for this semblance of normalcy, this word of the routine, even if, until now, it had always been someone else's pattern.

"Very well." He rearranged the papers and sat down, leaning the cane with its Death's head knob against the edge of the desk. "Why don't you begin by telling me what more you have learned about this vigilante case Sir Samuel was so irritated by, Commander?"

She nodded, and told him. It wasn't much. A few leads, the ever-present force of rumor as yet still mostly dormant. The River Watch thought there was something in the idea of searching the Ankh for footprints, as he had run off across its squelching crust. And so on.

"I see," said Vetinari, once she was finished. "Well enough. If I may make a suggestion, however - you may also wish to speak with your Traffic Division and Samuel Vimes, junior."

She stared. "What? Why? Sir."

"An incident of some interest occurred today," he said. "And a very fast man in a ridiculous suit also occurred, you might say."

"Ah," said Angua. "I'll look into it, sir, thank you."

He arched an eyebrow at her and steepled his fingers in front of his face. "Dear me, the last time Vimes _thanked _me for a lead must have been several years ago. In any case," he went on, before she could comment, "I expect you will have a report about it on your desk; that was merely forewarning."

"Sir," she said.

"While that, of course, I last heard only hours ago," Vetinari sighed. "And on that note - do not let me detain you, Commander."

She showed herself out.

**(1) "And **_**f**_**houlde She masquerade in thee Dresse of her Betters, let her Reap thee profit... Ye shalle Addre**_**ff**_** her, as, **_**f**_**ir, and Mock her with thee title, being Unfit for recognition as a true Womanne Leader, being an Impo**_**ff**_**ibility and ae Paradoxe." -- a (somewhat overexcited) monk of anonymous origins, as it turned out.  
**


	6. A Dramatic Wossname

**Chapter Five: A Dramatic Wossname, For Emergencies**

_In which Commander Angua has cause to regret the pedanticism of journalists when subject to interrogation and a boy defies the logical sequence of cause and effect_

There had been a bit more discussion, somewhat hindered by Sam's preoccupation with his dead pets, and then his mum had come in with tea and his father, once he had determined that he was still quite totally invisible to his wife, had made a discreet exit. Sam had done his best not to be bitter when he saw the goldfish do an about face and trail after his father; the tea, which was _not_ orange and thick enough to stand up a spoon, and was instead one of Sybil's best mysterious decaffeinated Auriental brands with the funny smell and the green scum on top, had gone some ways towards assisting in that area, since it had firstly shifted his attention to his bladder and secondly produced a soporific effect, i.e., sending him off to the happy land of slumber and subconscious carrots.

He understood all that. He even comprehended the part where Willikins had politely coughed him awake. What he was failing to grasp was the sentence about Commander Angua _vis a vis _her waiting for him at the door with audible impatience. Getting dressed and going downstairs and seeing her on his doorstep, radiating irritation, did nothing at all to clarify matters.

"Erm," he said, as she looked him up and down and sighed. "Hallo, capt - I mean. Um. Commander now? Are you, um."

"I am um, yes," said Angua. "Sorry about this, Sam, but we'll take any leads we can get on this case and you are unfortunately one of them."

Sam blinked. "Case? Since when has a madman dressing up and hitting people been a case? A _Nobby, _maybe, but..."

"Not that," she replied, waving a hand impatiently. "But we think the incident is connected to a more serious one that happened a few days ago."

"Oh!" said Sam, remembering Vimes' explanation, and then, recalling that, as Vimes had put it, he'd been the only bloody person to notice his father's supernatural presence, as well as noting Angua's curious expression, amended that to, "er, I mean, oh. I see. All right, then."

They set out not quite in step; Angua proceeding, Sam loping along arrhythmically to keep up. From the looks of it, a tomorrow _had_ occurred, despite the deluge of the previous day, but it was decidedly dismal, all bruised skies and glistening cobblestones with an oily sheen floating on top of the coating of rain water.

"Uh," said Sam, breaking the silence after only a few streets, "why are you? Um. Commander. No offense, that is, I just -"

Angua looked at him. He shrank back a little, as best he could, which was not very well, given that he was a lanky young man and not inclined towards retractability. She seemed to weigh things in her head for a moment, and then said, "You might as well know, I suppose. Carrot refused the position."

"What? Why?"

She paused. "He is, shall we say, preoccupied with his impending fatherhood."

It took Sam several minutes longer than it should have to work that out. "Oh. Congratulations?"

"Thank you," she said, dryly.

"But, er, that doesn't make any sense whatsoever."

She gave him an odd, sideways look. "Did Mister Vimes - your dad, that is - ever take you aside and talk to you about Captain Carrot?"

"Ah... no?" said Sam, tentatively. "I mean, he explained about the Dwarfish thing, and how I wasn't to snicker if Carrot started talking about how to _kr'z'k-_ing his _g'rr'aduhn'ak, _but I don't see how that could possibly be relevant -"

"Good, because it isn't. Look, you're just going to have to live in suspense for a while, then."

"I'm a journalist," said Sam. "I'm not very good at suspense. If I were good at suspense I would be writing mulches**(1).**"

"Ha," said Angua. "I imagine that you'll learn to deal."

Before he could respond, they turned a corner and Pseudopolis Yard came into view, its grey outline managing to loom and squat over the admittedly low skyline at the same time, an impressive feat, all things considered.

"If you could just come this way, Mr. Vimes," the ahahaha _oh gods_ Commander said, suddenly official. It took Sam a full thirty seconds to realize that she was talking to him. At least she hadn't pronounced it 'mister', though. There was that.

And she prodded him up to the Commander's office, which was as familiar to him - a good deal more familiar to him than his parents' shared bedroom, and sat him down in front of the desk, kindly enough. He composed himself in the face of the grimy pale walls now lacking the focal point to their background - Angua hardly counted, so out of place was she - and tried to read the paperwork upside down, because some instincts are bone-deep.

"How much do you know about the robbery and subsequent murders at the Bank, Mr. Vimes?"

"Ah, very little," he lied. "I think Mr. de Worde was covering that one himself, wasn't he? I remember him going on about it to Miss**(2)** Cripslock. At length."

"Yes," said Angua with a straight face, "that is probably the one."

"I don't see the connection -"

"Both the person you encountered yesterday and the vigilante murderer were costumed," said Angua, "and both uttered similar, shall we say, rallying cries?"

"Wh-oh. Like... 'you are safe now, good cityfolk', style of thing?" said Sam.

"Just so. You can look over Captain Carrot's report, if you like." She turned it around helpfully. He coughed, tried not to blush, and tilted it up for a better view.

_...at which, point, the Masked mann struck Pose 3(iii) and said in, a pecuailirly strangled voice, "Justice, has been done here" before spreading his, wings, and taking Flight._

"Pose 3a(iii)?" Sam said at last, carefully describing the arcs of both parentheses.

"Dangerously Heroic," said Angua, pronouncing the capitals just as carefully. "Generally involves out-thrust breast and/or chest, turned out ankle, and much bulging of every available bicep. Often confused with 4b, to wit, Being Bloody Stupid, but there is a subtle distinction, namely, in the latter case the poseur, as it were, is dead."

She took a deep breath, and appeared to be on the verge of going on, when there was a polite knock on the door.

"Come in, Captain," she said, and not without reason. No one in the world could knock as politely as Carrot.

Carrot entered bearing something large and bulky, wrapped in brown paper, plastered with 'REDIRECT' labels, and most notably bearing two stickers, one of which - Sam squinted - read 'THIS WAY UP --' although it was difficult to make out because it was upside down, and the other of which read 'FRAGILE, HANDLE WITH CAUTION'. A scrap of paper had been laced through the cords binding it, too.

Carrot, as if reading his thoughts, shuffled aside some ancient paperwork**(3)** and balanced the package on the table. "The note said it was for you, sir."

Sam opened his mouth when he processed the last word and then, when Angua gave him a sharp glance, closed it.

"Thank you, Captain," she said, and with a few quick tears unwrapped it, revealing enormous quantities of White Porous Squishy Oblongs, Quite Good For Padding With**(5)**, and a large circle of metal, perhaps four feet in diameter or thereabouts. Angua cleared off more of the padding, and flipped the... cylinder was an apter word, Sam thought, or, er, round and approximately cheese-shaped thing, maybe... over. The other face was made out of glass, except for a metal shape set in the center.

Sam considered the shape for a moment. Plump triangular torso, oval head with two points coming up vertically on either side, and spread wings, membranous and spiky in shape. A child's drawing of a bat. His old teacher, Miss Susan, would never have approved**(6).**

"What the hells?" said Angua at last, a direct thinker.

"Difficult to say," said Carrot. "I'm not sure what purpose it could possibly have. Perhaps a Soul Cake Duck ornament?"

"Have you checked the date? We're in the middle of _May!_"

"Perhaps a somewhat temporally confused Soul Cake Duck ornament, then."

"I don't think that's it," Sam interjected, before he could see something entertainingly domestic that might well scar him far more than nineteen years in the company of Sybil and Samuel Vimes, who were, among other things, more and every bit as volatile than they appeared, respectively. He had been examining the glass, and thus had been the first to discover that the lid, as it were, came off. In the hollow belly of the thing was an unlit torch. "I think - yes, you'd light this... a bit like the clacks, really, but much more primitive."

This drew blank looks from both the watchmen. He sighed. "Or - shadow puppets. You'd take it up on a roof and light the torch and put the glass on - look at the curve, it must be some kind of lens - and you'd have a beam of light, visible from anywhere in the city, with the silhouetted bat in the middle. Yes?"

"That doesn't help matters much," Angua muttered. She wrestled the note loose from its straps, unfolded it, and read it aloud. "'_For use in emergencies. -- The Batty-Man.' _Who does he think he is?"

"Batty?" Sam suggested.

"Thank you for that insight, Sam," she growled, annoyed enough to forget formality. "Well, it looks as if we have another lead, gentlemen, since I can't think of anyone else likely to have the sheer nerve for this, let alone the stupid batty name."

"Can I go now?" said Sam hopefully; he suspected that it would be better for all concerned if he told his father about this.

"Just a few more questions. Did you see his face?"

"Whose?"

"The man who knocked you out of the way."

"No. I didn't even see evidence of male...ness. I did note the costume, though," he said. "Pink and blue, yards of it."

"What, nothing else?"

"It was a very striking outfit," Sam said defensively.

"I don't doubt it, but a little unhelpful under the circumstances."

"I'm very sorry, but I was _concussed _at the time_._"

The stare she directed at him suggested that a concussion was no excuse for slacking off when he should have been on alert to make the Watch's job just that degree easier. It was a good stare. She had learned it from a master, as he of all people would know.

He returned it, with added overtones of youthful rebellion and insouciance. "Graded II on Cantyoooooooo's system."

"This is what comes of interrogating journalists," she muttered, and then went on, "Very well, then, I want a detailed description of everything that happened in connection with the event."

"Right now?"

"Do you have an appointment, Mr. Vimes?"

He had to concede that one. "Well, all right."

"Thank you. Now, who did you speak to immediately preceding the incident?" she inquired, leaning forward in her chair until she could rest her chin on her hands and the trailing ash-blonde curls were in danger of coming into contact with the ineffable curry.

He hesitated, and said,

"Well, just before hand I was talking to Otto Chriek..."

He was careful to make no mention of the uneasiness Kark had induced in both of them, because he suspected that Angua, of all people would not appreciate prejudice against the undead. In any case, Angua was uninterested in most of the earlier conversation; the almost-getting-run-over-by-a-cart was clearly random and unconnected to whatever had happened beforehand, so that all she was interested in was some hint of the pink and blue apparition's origins, which he could not provide. She did take a few notes, and he thought he glimpsed a doodle of Carrot's shiny, shiny breastplate.

"Keep an eye on the Kark fellow, then," she said, when he was finished.

His jaw failed to drop. It made a little clanking noise as it did so. "Was I that obvious?"

"Your use of ellipses certainly was," she said, smiling at him. "But it was a good try. I think that's all, Mr. Vimes. You may go."

At her shoulder, Carrot gave him an encouraging look and a surreptitious thumbs up. Sam tried not to analyze this, and slouched out.

**(1) The term 'mulches' may perhaps require some explaining. It refers to the cheap wood-mulch paper on which novels like **_**The Quirmian Mobster's Kidnapped Bride **_**and magazines like **_**Quite True Crime, **_**a thriving industry in a city of simple tastes, were printed, and, of course, no servant of Truth could possibly approve, Miss Rachel Pantsalot, who read them in the lavatory, aside. **

**(2) Nineteen years had failed utterly to soften Miss Cripslock's Views; we will not even make mention of what they had done to one Adora Belle Dearheart's.**

**(3) To say nothing of the cockroach, the remains of the speaking-tube, the .303 bookworm(4), and the endless, ineffable strata of curry.**

**(4) Which was stunned, obviously; had it been conscious, all nearby paper and, indeed, a portion of the desk would be distinctly missing, and there would have been a good deal more bloated worm visible from under the stacks.**

**(5) A genuine da Quirm, because I'm sure you would never have guessed from the name, dearest reader.**

**(6) He had vivid memories of Soul Cake Duck day spent learning the differences between **_**Acerodon jubatus**_** and **_**Pipistrellus pipistrellus, **_**and why what was clearly one's head should **_**not **_**be placed on top of what was clearly the other's body(7).**

**(7) Hybrids like that are worse than the bloody vampiric watermelons.**

*

Even as they spoke, something else was on the many and varied lips of Ankh-Morpork citizens. Something new, only minutes old. No one was quite sure whose fault it was, although Mr. Lipwig's name was thrown up more times than could be strictly healthy for him.

Really, though, it was the Undertaking that was to blame for Bang Art.

Imagine... tunnels. For the trains, of course, strange sleek steel serpents with blank windows for eyes, streams of yellow light and silver as they roared past; but because there had to be an interlude between wall and train - for the humans - there were smooth tiled surfaces where there had been cheap brickwork.

And in all of Ankh-Morpork, there was not a better place for graffiti to be found.

At first that was all it was; vandalism, of a more colorful sort than had yet been seen. But Dibbler had started putting up posters, and graffiti artists had, by way of retort, begun painting murals, to fight the Establishment and the Unjust Commercialism of Authority**(1)**. Nowhere to be seen was tasteful, delicate masterpieces or crude scribbles or abstract splotches**(2)**. Instead, what streaked the walls were big, bold portraits, strong lines and action poses. Portraits of the people who fought Injustice and Corrupt Establishment, as the artists imagined them. Caricatures of ideals, embodiments. Anthropomorphisms strewn across the tiles. Exaggerated heroes, fleeting profiles of do-gooders fighting evil. It was like an explosion; color without culture, art without aesthetics, characters without character; faces that seemed to live and breathe and, in many cases, almost certainly curse. So they called it 'Bang Art', and once you give it a name...

Even a school can have a soul.

And, too, there was the boy.

He wasn't a street urchin. He didn't have the charm required to be a street urchin, or the broken top hat, and he wasn't cynical enough. He was just... one of the kids who slipped through the cracks to be found between the floorboards of the nasty old cellar into which the kids who had only slipped through the aboveground cracks found themselves in. He was, as a result of this, pale, doughy, soft around the edges. He did not often venture into the surface, because the tunnels were warmer.

He didn't talk much. He watched.

He saw the paintings as the rolled in, saw them become stylized, until Bang Art was so vivid and sharp and defined that it seemed to hum and vibrate, to pulse a little out of the flat constraints of the wall. He sketched on scraps of paper, on old flyers, on the back of papers. He thought about Bang Art, and about its limits.

No one, as yet, had reproduced an image of any one... superhero, as the subjects of Bang Art were beginning to be called. No one had made it a symbol, one symbol; it had, rather, myriad emblems, which was worse than having none. It was still, in all senses, an underground movement.

Then he examined the comic in the _Times, _and found it lacking, but good for a start. Comics, that was the thing. Bang Art, huge as it was, compressed into frames... that was how it could tell a Story about what ought to happen. Who ought to be.

He begged real paper off someone, because the Beggars' Guild was, on the whole, mild about these things. He started drawing in earnest. A flying shape, in a bright, carnival suit. A chin. A curling forelock.

And the trouble with the sequence of cause and effect is that, on an occult world, no one pays it any _bloody _attention.

**(1) Both of which Dibbler would have denied being a part of, on basic principles. He might also have added something about 'clean living' and 'I've a poultice for authoritarianism right here, two dollars a lick. Are you sure? No? Onna bun?'**

**(2) Understandably, since nailing abstract artists to handy surfaces by the ear had become something of a fashion, and though Vetinari was not, as it were, one for trend-setting, he nevertheless approved of that particular fad.**


	7. The Most Problematic Of Public Relations

**Chapter Six: Ankhman And Angua's Most Problematic Public Relations**

_In which we are introduced to a marine hero who makes up for in courage what he lacks in spleens and Sam approaches incandescence in the face of idiocy for reasons as yet unrevealed_**  
**  
Meanwhile...

In the depths**(1) **of the Ankh - that mighty artery of the Sto Plains, thick with silt and another four letter word beginning with 's', shaded in everything from lime green to octarine**(2)**, viscuous enough that in a few places it is shot with the rare current of relatively clear liquid that veins the sludge like pure ore veins dross, as Captain Carrot once so aptly pointed out - something stirred.

Had Leonard of Quirm turned his attentions to the magnificent task of inventing a device allowing one to see through the Ankh itself, and had someone wearing such goggles been near the stirring at the time, and had that someone also been wearing steel armor and been content with the watery**(3) **grave inevitable even in steel after the river's corrosive properties had been let loose on this hypothetical and most unfortunate soul, he, she, it, or they**(4) **would have observed smooth, glistening muscles, each bicep like a sack full of drowned puppies; would have observed scales of an aquamarine hue all along the length of that powerful glimpsed tail; would have observed a golden helmet, adorned with spikes and inexplicable nosepiece. And he, she, it, or they would have observed a wide and pink-lipped mouth appropriate to wholesome looking heroes everywhere open and begin to swear vigorously, until the man's**(5)** gullet was clogged up with slime and he clawed his way up towards the surface, pale eyes bulging.

He emerged at last, not with a splash but with a disturbing 'gluck' noise. He spat out goo. He gibbered.

"Hullo, all right, are you," said Vimes, who had been leaning over the railing of the Brass Bridge, careful to keep his translucent elbows from slipping through the wood, and watching with interest. The man who was inexplicably not dead yet ignored him, and flopped up onto the bank. He rolled his eyes. "Well then, I suppose you won't be wanting assistance. Since you can't see me. And all."

The man pulled enough of his mother naked self out to reveal that he was not, in fact, a man proper, what with the fins and the... other fins.

"Bloody vitalists," Vimes added, because humans wasn't really appropriate. Thirty hours, he thought ruefully to himself, and he was already going a bit Reg Shoe. It wasn't even much of a shock.

In dubious recognition of his morose mood, one of the goldfish bit him hard on the ear.

And it was therefore excusable that in his private little world of pain he almost failed to notice a flash of pink and blue in the alleyway and an extended thumb's up at which the fish-man-thing sighed, looked back at the water resignedly, and waded back in, though not before a small child of indeterminate gender**(6) **could wander up to a proximity hazardous for its boots and ask,

"Who're you?"

But not quite. Interesting, thought Vimes. And problematic.

The man paused in the midst of his efforts and made a sound rather like a fish might make were it to try to talk. Then he seemed to compose himself, and said, "I am... ANKHMAN! Sovereign of... the waters..."

"Oh," said the child.

"Kings now, is it?" said Vimes sourly, as he shoved the irritant goldfish into his cigar case for lack of a better prison and massaged his ear, a pointless exercise, what with the fingers passing through the lobe. "Huh. _Sovereigns._"

The Ankhman sank with a horrible sucking noise.

"Sovereigns," said Vimes again.

He looked from the bubbling surface to the now empty alleyway and back to the bubbling surface and back to the now empty alleyway and was only saved from the author's nefarious plans of the implementation of an infinite loop when the child piped up again and said,

"Do you think I should get a flag, mister see-through man?"

"Er," said Vimes, and then, "what? Can you see me?"

"I can see through you," said the child, proudly.

"Ah, right. Uh."

"Should I get a flag," it repeated, patiently.

"What do you want a flag for?" said Vimes.

"To wave while I'm yelling 'hurrah! Wrecks vee vat!' with," said the kid reasonably.

"Er. No," said Vimes.

"All right. Do you think he's the Queen of the Sea's daddy or her hubby or her sonny?"

"Possibly her... husband?" said Vimes.

"The Queen of the Sea can't marry," it admonished him. "Everyone knows that. Mum told me so."

"I see," said Vimes, hoisting himself over the railings clumsily and ending up tangled in the cross-spars. The child sniggered.

"Go away," he added.

"Why?" the kid said, even more reasonably.

"Otherwise I shall give you a smack," he told it, because a quarter of a century and a son had taught him a little more about the fine values of Ankh-Morpork style parenting.

"All right." The kid wandered off.

He glared at the mud, disentangled his arms, and stopped concentrating on imagining himself staying up. He fell.  
**  
(1) Or, perhaps more appropriately, bowels.**

**(2) Not in fact so very wide a spectrum, since the technical description of octarine is 'a sort of greeny-yellow-purplish'.**

**(3) Er.  
**  
**(4) Dissociative personality disorder and schizophrenia: the little-known plagues of hypothetical someones en mass.**

**(5) It's a perfectly valid classification, give or take a few legs and interesting organs. Like spleens. There's a philosophical conundrumunumunum for you: if a fish was born with an ill-placed spleen, would anyone hear it cry itself to sleep at night? And would posing that to the Tyrant of Ephebe get my free loofah recalled?**

**(6) Morpork is full of these youths, who are grubby but to a certain degree cared for, round-faced in spite of being generically poor and greedy, and presumably have about as many distinguishing features as an egg or, say, Moist von Lipwig, given how difficult it is for casual observers to differentiate between the males, the female, and unfortunately confused of this proliferate species that one can only assume furthers the species via spawning.**

*

Only minutes after he'd made it to the _Times, _Sam's pleasant and mindless reverie of Pointless Journalist Things was interrupted.

"Mister Samuel!" said a strong, ringing voice jangling with well-rounded vowels and solid, trustworthy consonants. Sam turned away from the headline**(1)** a fellow reporter, one Miss Lois Boulevard**(2)**, had been inviting him to help her with, only to see the terrible apparition that was Kark Clentt.

"Hullo," said Sam, letting his mouth run on automatic while his brain went and hid. "Sorry I missed our, um, appointment yesterday, I had a bit of a run-in with a cart..."

"Not at all, not at all," said Kark, smooth as runny butter that had then been refrozen and iced with marzipan for extra creaminess, his forelock practically radiating reassurance and forgiveness. It probably wasn't healthy to hate a hairstyle like Sam hated that forelock. He found that he didn't much care.

"I quite understand," Kark was going on, "you could hardly help that. Do you have a moment now? I wanted to speak to you."

"Not really," said Sam, ready for this one, "I have to help Miss Boulevard here." He pivoted towards her and discovered, to his dismay, that she was staring dreamily at Kark. "Hello? Miss Boulevard?"

"Mm?" she said.

He waved a hand in front of her face. "I was just going to help you with something, wasn't I?"

"Mm," she said, eyes trained on the vampire's tie.

"Well, Mister Samuel, she seems to have worked things out for herself," Kark said jovially, "so why don't we two go outside and have a talk, hmm?"

"Of course," said Sam miserably. "At once."

"Good man," said Kark, clapping him on the shoulder. Sam, not precisely a lightweight, despite his gawky frame, almost fell over. The vampire didn't even notice. "Let's go for a walk."

"What did you want to speak to me about?" Sam inquired, once he had recovered himself and stepped out of the busy press room into the street. (It only occurred to him a long, long time later to wonder at his unthinking obedience to Kark's unsaid assumption that he would follow.) "If you want to meet me tonight, that should be -"

"Yes indeed, same time, same place, and so on," said the vampire, waving a hand dismissively as they turned a corner and started down Short Street**(3)**. "No, I wanted to ask you about your conversation with Commander Angua, in fact."

Sam gaped at him, or tried to. It was rather hard on the mandibles, though, and after a few seconds he gave up for the strain of keeping his mouth open in a really good gape.

"What do you want to know?" he said at last, like a man talking around a sore tooth.

"I can see you're uneasy, but please, don't worry," said Kark. "It's just that I've been assigned to investigate the vigilante case, and I was wondering whether you had any juicy tidbits for me. You know. Freedom of speech and confidentiality, right? Between friends? We are friends, after all. I feel like I've known you all my life."

Sam met his gaze, and judged it to be the steady, unflinching look of a dishonest man. "She didn't tell me anything we don't already know, Mr. Clentt. Sorry."

"Did she say anything apparently unrelated but interesting?"

"Well, yes, but only because we were interrupted when someone delivered a package," said Sam, and then could have hit himself over the head with a warrant as triumph flashed across the vampire's square, placid face.

"A package? What was it?"

"I don't know," Sam lied, on principle.

"She didn't open it?" said Kark.

"She did," said Sam. "But, er, I didn't know what it was. Looked a bit like a lantern. Except not at all. With a bat logo on it."

The vampire's eyes narrowed. "Was there a note?"

"Uh, yes."

"What did it say?"

"'For Emergencies. The Batty-Man,'" Sam reeled off. "Look, why are you -"

"You haven't seen the lunch edition," said Kark, without preamble, and pulled a copy off the nearest newsstand, eliciting a garbled "Geroff!" from the very old dog hiding under Foul Ole Ron's cloak, which was alas cut off by Foul Ole Ron's amazingly sane decision to choose that moment to silence his Currently-Not-Thinking-Very-Well-About-What-Vampires-Do-To-People-Brain dog.

Sam took it with the delicacy of a man whose sanity hangs in the Pretty-Lucretia's**(4)**-spike-heels-on-eggshells balance, unfolded the thin, damp sheets and scanned the first page.

"Oh, hells," he said, after a brief pause.

"What's wrong?"

"What's wrong? What's wrong? The vigilante murderer's out and about inciting fracases with this stupid speech, that's what's wrong," said Sam, shaking the paper. "No wonder you're pulling out the stops about information sneaking, this is halfway to a national emergency -"

"Possibly," said the vampire at last. "Did you read the speech through? I thought it made some rather good points."

Sam stopped mid-step. "Which points were those? I only saw a lot of drivel about freedom from tyranny and oppression and crime lords, when everyone knows that Chrysophase moved on to Uberwald two years ago!"

"I believe our mysterious masked man was speaking metaphorically," said Kark.

"He can stuff it metaphorically too," said Sam. "This is ridiculous. Morporkians actually getting excited over soapbox rhetoric?"

But there were more watchmen around than normal, he realized, and the people were moving slowly, diffusively, and above all steadily in a single direction. They recommenced with walking, if only because the flow would eventually have knocked them over otherwise.

"What about that point about corruption in the justice system of the city?" said the vampire.

"The Watch?" said Sam blankly. "Unless you count Nobby, I don't think it's organized enough to corrupt, although it is a bit off its rocker as government branches go -"

"Yes," said Kark. "Especially after the, aha, regime change. I'm sure no one would have questioned your redoubtable father, but Commander Angua..."

"What about her?"

"She's a little unstable, isn't she? Werewolves always have a touch of trouble maintaining control, of course," he said, with a patronizing smile, "and, well, a _pregnant_ werewolf... I can only imagine what kind of stress she must be undergoing.... And Vetinari appointed her! You have to wonder -"

"I have known Commander Angua for my entire life," Sam snapped, "and I would not accuse her of... of unreliability should the gods write it in ten-foot letters on a lead slab**(5)**!"

"Can I quote you on that?" said the vampire, producing a pencil out of nowhere and licking it. He did spit out graphite afterwards, ruining the effect, but that didn't make it any less annoying.

"Yes!"

"...on a lead slab.." he muttered. "That's very good, lovely soundbite."

"Look, I don't know what the hell you're trying to accomplish, Mr. Clentt -"

"And here we are!" said Kark, as they came back into view of Sator Square.

It wasn't even a crowd, let alone a mob. But it had that same quality of the audience for his not quite fatal accident; it was _listening. _And growing, too.

On the podium was a diminutive, slim figure in a shiny black suit with a shiny black cape and shiny black wings and a shiny black mask with pointy things on top. The voice was more tremulous than compelling. It cracked occasionally. The language was hardly worth noting, just the usual mad ramblings of soapbox speakers.

And yet the collected listened in near complete silence. And Kark's eyes almost glowed as he watched.

Sam, who had been examining the stupid article more closely, realized that it ended with a 'TO BE CONTINUED'.

"You mean the speech has been going this _whole time?_" he hissed incredulously to his companion, who was at least still conscious, if repulsive and enthusiastic about this lunatic and a vampire.

Kark pressed a finger to his lip and indicated that he should listen as well. Unwillingly, he tried to settle down and reminded himself that he was a calm, reasonable young reporter who believed in free speech and equality and tolerance and did not assume that his father's organization was right just because he'd been raised in its arms, more or less. His feathers, had he had feathers and still been capable of thinking thoughts about how his emotions and the position of his feathers were connected rather than thinking thoughts about 0000000, an implausible proposition at best, floated gently back into place.

Until he processed more than two cohesive sentences together, that is. After that he found himself too angry for metaphors.

**(1) "They call me **_**Mister**_** Patrician: Official Biography of Giggling Lord Smince" is difficult to fit into a column, even a Human Interest column, and the thesaurus came up with only unspeakable alternatives.**

**(2) An unfortunate last name originating in an even more unfortunate incident in her family history involving her great-great-great-great-grandmother's pigeon pie and an unusually active gargoyle.**

**(3) In accordance with the ancient institution of That Famous Ankh-Morpork Sense Of Humor, Short Street is, indeed, very long. Irony so profound as to make a critic weep, no?**

**(4) Have I mentioned that we will not be speaking about what twenty years had done to Miss Adora Belle Dearheart, esq. "Spike"'s many and various Views? Because we won't. Ever.**

**(5) A bit of choice figurative language chosen as a result of too much exposure to fiery prophets as a child, since Miss Susan believed in a hands-on approach to religious history.  
**

A/N: I think I need to inject humor, because this chapter annoys the hell out of me. Therefore, next week on _The Brave and the Bold_: EXPLOSIONS. You had better believe it.


	8. On Shaking Hands With The Literal Abyss

**Chapter Seven: Helpful Tips On Shaking Hands With The Literal Abyss**

_In which there is a direct correlation between being a numbskull and being blown up, and the ante is upped from goldfish to guppies to golden octopussies_

"There is a rot in this city," said the speaker at the podium. Sam couldn't see his face behind the mask, which was polished and shaped to represent an anonymous forehead, a strangely geometric nosepiece**(1)**, and blank slitted eyes.

"A rot," he said again. "They call it the eye of the Disc, Ankh-Morpork, city of cities, light of civilization. But I say to you now: looking about you, do you see light?"

Some - the ones in the very back - bothered to turn their heads in a pretense at listening like real people listen, which was to say, in a pretense at actually thinking of what to say next. Mostly there was silence.

"Yes?" ventured a dwarf.

"I see filth," said the speaker. "I see men prepared to sell their souls for stability. I see men content to shake hands with the abyss so that tomorrow will be pretty much like today."

Sam wondered vaguely how you shook hands with an abyss, and also what all this red mist was doing in front of his eyes.

"I see petty, stupid people. I see mere legality turned into morality. The Ankh-Morpork City Watch is famed across the Plains for its fair, swift justice. Your Lord Vetinari is a catchphrase for benevolent ruling. The Guilds are a model of self-balancing demoncracy. Mr. von Lipwig whose golden suit is mass-marketed among adoring young women who carry multicolored paper fans in his honor, he has revolutionized your government, it is said, and turned it into a thing of beauty, a well-oiled machine. They say that between these slick, well-spoken men who know how to dilute and transmute a black to a grey and a white to a red, this city is hurtling towards enlightenment, advancing ever on. Is it not so?"

There was hesitation at this, because even in their hypnotized state Ankh-Morpork citizens recognized cosmic untruths. The infamous they that the vampire referred to**(2) **tended to talk more about Mr. von Lipwig's theoretical erotic adventures**(3) **and whether Nobby Nobbs' failure to die after an enterprising little girl had set him on fire meant that he wasn't a vampire than about Ankh-Morpork hurtling towards anything, with the possible exception of immediately after that unfortunate student joke played at the UU which involved the entire city being nicked on a rainy afternoon, when the they in question had been discussing its hurtling towards a distant star system, _not _enlightenment.

But they nodded nonetheless, murmured and nodded and acted like scripted players instead of a slightly puzzled crowd.

"I come to you to show you that they are lying. That the sophistication of amorality here achieved must be rejected at all costs, lest you slip into the gaping maw of nihilism. Your souls have been dealt away, yes - but you can still win them back. We can tear out the root of evil that has embedded itself here. We can burn away the sin until this city returns to its glorious beginnings. Until this city _deserves _the title: eye of the Disc, clear and all-seeing and just."

And Sam, who was not his father, listened like the various species jostling him on all sides were not; like most people never listen in their lives. He came to a conclusion, which was this: that what he was listening to was not evil or a falsehood or just another marketing plan.

It was worse than that. It was stupidity, and it was huge, overarching stupidity, not the petty and affordable kind. Stupidity wrapped in pretty words. He'd become a journalist not least because he liked words, and he liked the truth, and he wanted to annoy his father - yes, that was a part of it, and he liked the way that he saw a few of the many reread an article and pause over it to think. And this - this left his mouth tasting of bile.

He thought:

_No one _has the right to be that incredibly, utterly _dumb._

The rage that had been fermenting drained away, when he thought it. It was replaced by certain decisions, and - plan was the wrong word. He intended to do several things, one after the other, starting with pivoting around on one heel and elbowing his way through the crowd. Kark was too busy staring, and generally speaking, the crowd didn't notice, although he did almost shatter his elbow trying to budge a deceptively well-dressed troll.

Commander Angua met him in an alleyway, her expression ever so slightly resigned. "Sam? Care to tell me what the hell's going on? None of the gargoyles -"

Sam gestured at the square. There were gargoyles, all right. They were clinging to their outcrops and pulling feathers out of their ears, the better to hear a lot of swamp dragon dung with**(4). **"I think they've been brainwashed, at this point."

"Damn," said Angua, starting out of the mouth of the alley and into the square. He caught hold of her arm just in time to pull her skidding back from the view of the podium. She looked at him. He let go still more hastily.

"You don't understand! If you go out there you'll be mobbed!"

"What?" she said, reluctantly stepping back and turning the look into a full on glare.

"See for yourself," he said, lowering his voice a little. "There's something wrong here. He's done something to them, and he's not very happy with you just now, and I think if he told them to jump right now they wouldn't even ask 'what color?' -"

"That bad?"

He nodded grimly.

Captain Carrot, at this point, jogged in from the other side. "I got here as soon as I saw the clacks," he said, flushed and as breathless as Carrot ever got, which was, not very. A triangular build and residue clean mountain air will do that to a man. "What is it, A- sir? Did something happen?"

"Yes," said Angua. "I just wish I knew what. You read the paper?"

"The lunchtime edition? Of course. But I assumed it was just -"

"Soapbox rambling, yes," said Angua. "Gods damn it, I hate the political ones."

Sam almost snorted at that, and paused for a moment to wonder what his father was doing before settling back into the bizarrely heightened state of mind he'd been in a moment ago, running on subdued, massive irritation with idiots. "I think it's not - that simple," he said.

"Oh no?" said Angua. "And what else do you think, Sam?"

He met her sharp gaze. "I think what we need is a diversion," he said.

A slow smile. Commander Angua was really good at terrifying smiles, he thought, a bit lightheadedly. "I see," she said. "Carrot? What do you think?"

"In the interests of avoiding public unrest?" said Carrot. "It's a good idea. What type of diversion were you thinking of, Mr. Vimes?"

Sam put on his best noncommittal expression and said, "A bit of a childish one, Captain, but I think it'll be very effective. They were some of my favorite entertainments as a boy, and I assure you they are very diverting."

Carrot blinked. Angua leaned over and whispered something in his ear. Comprehension dawned at approximately the speed of light, which was to say, rather sluggishly, since light cannot travel very fast in an atmosphere as magic-thick as the Discworld's. It started at his chin and worked its way up by pores, as square inches of clean, pink-scrubbed skin slowly came to an understanding.

"Oh," he said.

"Permission, officers?"

"Granted," said Angua, "but don't get smart with us or you'll regret it. Now run for it, I want to get in there and arrest the smug bugger."

"Yes ma'am," he replied.

"Sir," Carrot corrected automatically, but Sam had already set off at a good clip. Angua was still there, however, and she took advantage of the rare free moment to punch him in the arm.

"Ow!"

"As the father of my unborn children, you are strictly forbidden to call me 'sir'," she informed him, sternly.

"But -"

"No. Buts."

"Just as you say, Angua," he said meekly, and rubbed his arm. There were going to be kinks in his chainmail from where her knuckles had met flesh, he could tell. Detritus would probably darn it for him.

"Hmph," she replied, and leaned her head against his shoulder. He eyed her askance for a moment and then wrapped his unbruised arm around her. It was very sweet and comfortable for two minutes, what with their being far enough away to not have to hear what the vampire was spewing. Two short, precious minutes of simple physical closeness that they had rather been missing out on in all the fuss and tragedy of the last week. Two minutes of not thinking.

And then came the explosions.

**(1) Never trust a geometric nosepiece. They can only lead to trouble and, in some especially unfortunate cases, a broken nose.**

**(2) Also known as 'the community', 'everybody', and 'a man/dwarf/troll/attractive young women with pointy canines I met in a pub'.  
**  
**(3) Speculation that was, by the way, totally unjust and unwarranted; Miss Dearheart has always kept her husband well in hand and, where necessary, well under spiked heel.**

**(4) It is surprisingly different to hear the unique mating call of the average swamp dragon's dung, which is steaming, lumpish, and halfway-sentient; feathers in the way don't help.**

*****

There was, on the _Times _staff, despite the many who wished it were otherwise, a man known to his adoring readers as Fizz and to his less than adoring readers as "that bloody political cartoonist." And he was sitting at his desk, sketching the outlines of Mr. Fusspot's left ear, when there came a knock at his lopsided cardboard door**(1)**.

He strode over and slammed it back against the wall. "Yes? Well?"

Fizz was a tall and dramatically proportioned - and inclined - man. His first impression was that there was no one there. His second impression was of a faint squeaking from somewhere around the region of his knees.

He looked down. There was a boy swaying gently over his doorstep, a pasty child clutching papers in both hands. The lad was keening softly to himself and seemed about to faint, but he at last lifted his head and mumbled, "Mr. Fizz?"

"Yes? Who're you?"

"...wanted to talk to you 'bout cartoons..." the kid mumbled. He looked like hells, white, greenish, beaded with sweat**(3) **and rain.

"Look, why don't you come in?" he said, hauling the boy up by his disintegrating collar. "It's raining naked watchmen**(4) **out there."

As he closed the cardboard door and leaned his visitor against the fireplace in hope that at least some of the sogginess could be dried out, though it was probably a hopeless cause, from that face, which had been born soggy, he thought that he saw the flicker of a tooth-sucking gap around the edge of the flames, like a burst of dark light superimposed over normal fire. But he must have been imagining it, because all of Otto's eels had died off in a freak incident years ago. Certainly, he must have been imagining it.

And he was _definitely _imagining the suggestion of a tentacle.  
**  
(1) Like most artists, Fizz was of a melancholic temperament. Like most cartoonists, Fizz had no sense of humor but had high(2) opinions of that sense of humor which he did not in fact have. This unfortunate combination led to a great deal of inner torment and occasional property damage. The door had been a casualty of his need for a half decent drawing board two months earlier.**

**(2) And by 'high' I mean stinking.**

**(3) Not in any specific place. Just generally beaded with it.**

**(4) One of the less colorful of modern Ankh-Morpork idioms, but nevertheless worthy of note, since it originated in living memory after a particularly bad storm, when a certain Commander was supposedly seen tumbling to earth from the Library dome, swearing all the way down, of course, and with his lovely armor mysteriously misplaced.**

*

There are probably things more unpleasant than a) being a ghost and b) taking a short and most emphatically not sweet dive, ectoplasmic-cardboard-boot-soles-first into the torpid Ankh.

For instance, one could a) still have a body to worry about and b) be taking a short and most emphatically not sweet dive, _real-_cardboard-boot-soles-first into the torpid Ankh.

Or one could a) still have a body to worry about and b) be taking a short and most emphatically not sweet dive into the torpid Ankh while wearing not even that much protection on the naked, pink, thriving**(1) **cells of one's hypothetical feet.

_Or, _worse yet, one could be a tortoise**(2).**

Vimes didn't think about those alternatives to his current enterprise, though, because it was bad enough facing reality without getting a load of bloody counterfactuals mixed into the mess that was him, sinking through the Ankh and feeling his essence dissolve just a little around the edges, since in the past few millenium the Ankh has developed occult corrosiveness as well as the regular kind out of sheer contrariness or, possibly, a desire to fit in with the city it birthed.

"Bugger," he said, and felt the resistance even as his ghostly jaws closed through the sludge. Then he sighed and extricating his fingers from some supernatural chickenwire that had been slurping past pushed forward.

He knew how to swim, more or less. He'd learned relatively late in life, because as a Cockbill Street lad he'd not had the time or inclination to go dipping out in the surprisingly fluid ocean water lapping at Ankh-Morpork's vermin-infested, tourist-hazardous**(3)** docks, but he'd learned, one way or another; kicking through freezing water while being chased by mad werewolves had proved quite an effective teacher, and kicking through freezing water while being chased by, er, his own personal living incarnation of vengeance and rage was an even better one - to say nothing of the incident with Mavis Trouncer, which had been the best where quick adaptation was concerned. But it was the one he would never say anything of. Ever**(4)**. So it didn't count.

Swimming in the Ankh, however, was probably a smidgen worse than swimming in freezing water underground somewhere in Uberwald with mad werewolves, living incarnations of vengeance and rage, _and _Mavis Trouncer after him. Especially since he was a ghost, and therefore had exactly as much friction to make use of as he had solidity to risk in the gnawing acids of the Ankh. And he would probably never have made it, were it not for the goldfish.

They led the way, glowing in the purple-brown muck like silver beacons, and their eyes seemed to be trained on the Ankhman without fault, while Vimes' were hard-pressed to catch a slice of flipper at this point. He gave up on struggling after a few minutes and used the two largest ones as tow-fish. They didn't seem to mind.

And he figured that, if they were leading him to the den of this stupid vigilante business, it was more or less worth it. He wasn't quite sure why it was worth it - it was feasible, albeit improbable, that his personal hell would be worse than this damn limbo of being an invisible onlooker, something he'd never been in life and hated in death. Still.

If he _had _to choose an explanation... well...

It was probably the damn terrier instincts.

Again.

But either way, he was going to solve this mystery if it killed him. And the good news was, it had already done _that._

He thrashed on, and sometimes was pulled on, more and more frequently as they got deeper. Yet the liquid seemed to be thinning out, assuming he was not dazed by the fumes he could no longer smell except in memory of morphic resonance; they were approaching the river mouth. Vimes clung to the thought that in open sea all he would have to do is imagine a little surface area to help him through the water in proper ghostly fashion.

As it turned out he needn't to have bothered considering such logistics, because ghostly travel doesn't really work that way. It was more a question of... _concentrating. _And when you're hooked to the world by tenuous threads, well. Locale is a secondary concern. It was just a question of direction.

The fabric of reality twisted a little. Somewhere, Lobsang swore and the Great A'Tuin twitched. It was no big deal, except for the ghost of one Samuel Vimes. And the next thing _he_ knew, he was in a place that he had never, in fact, seen, but recognized nevertheless. It had a name that haunted his dreams, not least because it was the sort of name that had not, as Detritus put it, got all its teeth in.

Leshp.

"So help me, if there are tentacles involved in this there is going to be trouble," Vimes said aloud, taking in the decor of the submarine streets. His feet came to rest on greenish tiles, engraved with octopussies. His back ended up against a pillar which was, coincidentally, engraved with octopussies.

The doorway to the spiky, elaborate Klatchian-style palace was not engraved with octopussies, but it did reveal a flicker of a tailfin as Ankhman disappeared into its depth. Vimes shrugged, and did as he had done reliably for several decades: he followed.

**(1) Briefly.**

**(2) And if you were expecting elaboration on that, dear reader, you clearly know nothing about tortoises.**

**(3) Technically the two adjectives should be combined further; Ankh-Morpork's **_**hazardous-thanks-to-tourist-infestation **_**docks. But the author has used up her hyphen quota for the next year, and had to make do, because the Punctuation Distributor was threatening to take the excess out of her commas, and we can't be having with that, can we? I mean count the ones used in that sentence alone!**

**(4) **_**Ever, **_**you hear me?**

A/N: I'm so proud of myself, all that plot in one entry to this sprawling thing.

Raise your hand if you think I'll have the tentacles involved in under three chapters! Raise your hand a little higher if you think I'll have Vetinari off the wooden chair and plotting for vengeance in under five! Raise your hand _even higher _if you think I should change the title to The Brave and the Bold and the Slightly Deranged!

(Serious about that last one. I am needing your thoughts. Your thoughts, you must give them to me.)

Thank you. Thank you. Your support makes all the difference.


	9. Bastards United Cannot Be Ignited

**Chapter Eight: Supercilious Bastards United Cannot Be Ignited**

_In which Sam walks with fools and Miss Lacy von Lipwig is enthusiastic about chaos and crowd control against an attractive backdrop of anti-public-speaking publicly speaking committees_**  
**  
The Fools' Guild had a menacing stone facade and dark, narrow hallways that radiated gloom, but Sam rather liked the place, in a quiet sort of way. He had fond memories of it, because Mr. Bent was a Friend of the Family**(1), **and as a kid he had gotten along surprisingly well with the unfortunate apprentice clowns, glum, bespotted specimens of manhood though they were. He made them laugh, though he had only ever cared to become friends with one or two.

Fortunately, this select circle included the doorman.

"Toddo?" he said, when he had pulled the trick doorbell and jumped a foot back just in time to avoid stumbling on the sidesplitting**(2)** revolving concrete block.

The heavy, rusting doors slid open a crack. One thickly made-up eye peered out. "Is that you, Sam?"

"Yep," said Sam. "Unhook the bucket, please?"

"Oh, all right." There was an extended clanking, followed by the long slow groan of non-consensual machinery being molested by inexperienced hands, followed by a splat, a humorous clang, and a spray of water that missed Sam's shoes by about a hair and sloshed across the steps.

"Thank you." Sam edged inside, trying to avoid scraping off more than a square inch of skin and general body matter on the ancient iron. The door slammed shut behind him. He circumnavigated the custard pie lying forlornly by the umbrella stand and continued, "How are you? Sorry I haven't been around much, I've been... busy..."

That was one word for it, he added to himself. Toddo was nodding, purple curls bouncing with each motion. "Don't worry about it. We were all very - er, quite - er, well, a few of us were somewhat sorry to hear about your father. He was a good man. No sense of humor, of course, but what would the world be if we were all the same?"

"Simpler," Sam mumbled. "Somewhat less likely to involve damn heroes running around and mucking things up."

"Pardon?" said Toddo.

"Oh, nothing. Listen, we should catch up some time. But not at one of your Guild's bars, because I barely survived the ladders last time. And not right now, because I have to run. Um. Do you know where Jacko is?"

"I think he was assigned Hall of Ledgers duty today," said Toddo. "Memorizing puns."

Sam's face winced in pure molecular sympathy, while his mouth went on staunchly. "Ah, right. Thanks very much. I must run, I'm afraid."

He half-ran, half-hopped down the corridor and skidded into the Hall of Ledgers in full expectation of seeing his heels kick up sparks.

Jacko, alone in a dank corner, reading through a horribly depressing sheaf of licensed Fun**(3)**, glanced up. "Hullo, Sam. Prithee -"

"No prithees!" said Sam, hurriedly. "Listen, I need your help. Do you have any of those official unofficial hilarious bombs?"

"No," said Jacko, looking mystified. "I always make those when I need one."

"How do you set them up?"

"I have the materials in my trousers, one moment -"

He wrestled with the enormous wire-supported waistband for a moment and produced a bucket of flour, a match, some water, some Wow-Wow sauce, and a lemon. Sam blinked and recomposed himself quickly. "Great. Can you come with me, then? This will only take a few minutes, I promise."

"Well, if you say so, but -"

Sam was already racing back the way he'd come. Jacko looked around him, shrugged, stuffed the various supplies back into his drawers, and flapped after him, shiny shoes bouncing sadly off the stone floor.

It wasn't far from the Fools' Guild to Sator Square, appropriately enough; after all, apprentice and journeymen clowns were expected to practice in the square at least once a week, and held contests and organized books about who could garner the most thrown tomatoes. One street down and two alleys across, before Sam halted and Jacko likewise halted, a process which may or may not have involved colliding with Sam's abruptly inert back.

"Oof," said Sam. Jacko, practiced in these matters, had taken the opportunity to roll off and set up his masterwork while he was horizontal enough to be able to perform the task without an excess of twanging noises. Sam sighed and clambered to his feet and wisely elected not to interfere with the arcane processes.

"What exactly did you want this for?" Jacko said, curiously, just before adding the Wow-Wow sauce.

"Er. I need a diversion," said Sam. "It's a journalist thing."

"From the crazed anti-authoritarian speaker who's exercising some kind of hypnosis on his audience?" said Jacko, who was quite bright, for a clown, and, indeed, for anyone. Perhaps it was the brilliantly green hair, but he was definitely clever, sometimes inconveniently so, although Sam didn't mind that much except insofar as it meant time would be wasted in explanations if he wasn't quick.

"Yes," said Sam, and then, "the Wow-Wow sauce is the last ingredient, is it? Right."

He scooped up bucket and bottle, ducked through the outer fringes of the dispersed citizens, set the pail down next to a troll so's it wouldn't do much damage, opened the tiny tube, and popped it in whole before running for the relative safety of the alleyway.

Even so, the little 'oomph' of rapidly changing air pressure almost blew his notebook out of his hand, and the smell of burning ozone filled the atmosphere, as opposed to the usual smell of burning water and burning piss and burning turpentine and a variety of other substances, many to be found in Dibbler's sausages.

And in the smoky confusion he was pleased to say the huddled masses unhuddle and begin acting in a fashion more appropriate to Ankh-Morpork citizens, i.e., hitting each other and swearing.

He turned around to face Jacko, who would probably be wanting that explanation, about, say, right now.

At least, so he had assumed. But Jacko was gone. Sam frowned at the space where he had been lying, as could be seen from the outline in chalk dust, and then shrugged. He hadn't mentioned that what they were doing was fully sanctioned by the Watch, and the man had a right to be nervy, under the circumstances.

Which just goes to show that quite intelligent people can be complete and total idiots.  
**  
(1) For a variety of reasons, mostly involving Mr. Lipwig's sick sense of humor and Mrs. Bent's determination to move up in society and Lady Sybil's friendly soul and healthy donations to the Sunshine Sanctuary and the unfortunate incident with the dragon and the left sock. Yes.**

**(2) The 'literally' goes without saying, I'm sure. Please ignore the inherent paradox. My little joke.**

**(3) You could tell it was Fun, because it said so on the top in large, Gothic print and because there were numbered lists, and indexes, and graphic woodcuts of what exactly would happen to you if you buggered up the timing on the well-known "An Omnian(4) and a Offlerist priest walk into a bar...(5)"**

**(4) Other and lesser religions have members that are generally only important in the comedic sense when ordained; in Omnianism, however, every man is a devout man, and really, really wants to lend you a pamphlet.**

**(5) The joke is too convoluted to be safely recorded here, lest it open wormholes in the fabric of L-spacetime. Suffice to say that it involves a crocodile sandwich, an ill-advised pune or play on words, and a particularly trigger-happy old deity.**

*

Fizz pounded wildly on his employer's door.

"Mr. de Worde!"

"What is it?" said William, opening it testily. "I have a story to get off the clacks, man! Be quick, can't you?"

"You have to take a look at this," said Fizz.

"Why?"

"Well, for one thing, it could double our sales..."

"What, again?"

"Yes, Mr. de Worde. Just... look at it, all right?"

"Very well."

He took the sheaf of colored papers that Fizz was waving at him, and began to read. Fizz imagined for an instant that History smudged and... _split..._

*

Elsewhere, Havelock Vetinari was having a Democratic Moment.

Democratic Moments were among the finest inventions of his long and, if not iron-handed, at least acceptably steely rule. They were a natural extension of the Committee; or, to look at it another way, Committees were a natural extension of Democratic Moments. One might even say that both were a natural extension of, say, Democracy itself, but since both were guided and pruned in the appropriate places by a man charitably named an idiosyncratic tyrant and uncharitably named a right [unspeakable and untranslatable idiom] bastard, this was a bit of a stretch. They were inefficient, noisy, and failed to express the voice of very many people, but they had the advantage of looking very good when reported in the _Times _as part of Ankh-Morpork's government's increasing shift to an idiot vote-yourself-rich system in accommodation of the changing times and the oncoming Century of the... was it Cobra now?

They were also works of art, in His Lordship's opinion, to rival _Don't Talk To Me About Mondays _and the like; as with most works of art, they required considerable effort on the part of the artist. Fortunately, he had his clerks on hand to assist, and he had his clerks well-trained. The Rats' Chamber was a riot, but Drumknott still heard him when he turned and murmured, "I believe that my godson would benefit from a good view of this particular debate and analysis. See to it, please."

"Yes, my lord," said Drumknott, and went to find the Captain of the Palace Guard.

Vetinari settled back further in his chair at the head of the oval table, and smiled as he listened to the dulcet tones of representatives of all Ankh-Morpork, specifically those parts of it standing around and screaming at each other. He took his enjoyment where he could.

Sam's arm, firmly gripped between a troll's massive two fingers, arrived in under ten minutes. The rest of the lad followed.

"Ah, very good," said Vetinari. "Tell me, Samuel, what do you think we should do about the impending national crisis?"

"What impending national crisis?" said Sam, looking panicked.

"I am told that we are threatened with invasion by..." he glanced down at his notes "...inappropriately dressed terrorists. Or possibly that we have already been invaded by them; even the beggars seemed unclear. There was a most interesting speech being given, you know, up until it was so unhappily interrupted by what Drumknott assures me was an entirely spontaneous conflagration."

"It was just a loony in a suit, Uncl-sir," said Sam, blushing. "Just a lone madman."

"Indeed?" said Vetinari. "Dear me. A new opinion, like a breath of Pseudopolis air into our stifled political climate. Well, we will of course consider it. If you would be so kind," he said to someone hovering over his shoulder, and held out an implement of considerable importance to everyone concerned.

The someone nodded, accepted what he offered them, and slipped through the close press of Guild heads and other persons who imagined themselves key to the city's workings, until they had reached a clear spot near the widest point of the table. Then the someone brought the implement - Vetinari's cane - down flat on the petrified wood in a single eardrum-puncturing thock of solid impact.

The noise stopped. Silence bloomed from the center of the table outward, as all heads turned - towards the Patrician, not towards the slim figure still holding the walking stick against the glossy surface. There would probably be a dent where the iron base had come down like the wrath of a very precise sort of god, Sam thought. It had the flavor of a ritual, these planned and careful actions. Things happening. One after the other.

"Ladies, gentlemen, and undecided entities," Vetinari said, quietly, "we appear to have achieved some dissent as to the cause as well as the solution at last. New evidence suggests that the city is not, in fact, on the verge of collapse, despite the demagogue firmly planted on his soapbox. I think... yes... Lord Downey, Lord Rust, Sir George, Lady Venturii..."

Sam's eyes glazed over like delicious honey chicken as his godfather carefully divided up the mass in order of volume and contrariness. It took some time, but at last seven new committees were ushered off into separate, smaller, and thick-walled rooms built for just their purposes and the Rats Chamber was almost empty, except for Vetinari and his clerks and, well, Sam.

"Ah, thank you," said the Patrician, accepting his cane. The shape that had returned it to him bent and whispered something in his ear. "And of course I must introduce you. Sam, this is Marietta von Lipwig**(1)**, Assistant Secretary of Crowd Control. Miss Lipwig, this is Mr. Sam Vimes, who prefers not to go by his ducal title and works as of three months ago for our own illustrious _Times._"

"Nice to meet you," said Miss Lipwig, turning so that she was standing in sunlight. Sam got a general impression of a pleasant heart-shaped face framed by dark brown curls and perched atop narrow shoulders. And because he recognized the name, he was not as shocked as he might of been when he tried to focus on the features, and found his attention slipping to her blouse or dark grey skirt or her hat or her amazingly tall stack of notebooks that she had somehow acquired in the interlude. Still, it was unsettling. He had never in his life met someone so... so... _vague _up close_, _and it hadn't been the same, watching the Postmaster General from a distance.

"Er," he said, and then, "and the same to you. Look, sir, can I go -"

"That is rather uncourteous to Miss Lipwig," said Vetinari, who might or might not have been smirking at him. "I'm positive that Commander Angua and her men are handling the situation with the utmost competence, Samuel, you needn't hurry."

"I don't mind," said Miss Lipwig cheerfully. "I know how it is with you journalists, always rushing off somewhere. May I come with?"

"Er," Sam said again. "Well, yes, of course, but it might be a bit, um, chaotic..."

"I live for excitement," she told him, dropping her stack of notebooks onto the table without ceremony. "Shall we?"

They went.

Vetinari watched them go, noted the nano-iconograph dangling from his secretary's ear, and nodded to himself. Then he examined, with a mix of squinting and fingering, in quick succession, the latest papers and notebooks that had been brusquely been set down before him, the depth of the lumps formed in the plaster caused by people on the other side of aforementioned thick walls hitting aforementioned thick walls very hard - none worthy of note compared to some in his collection, (he allowed himself a moment to think nostalgically of the days when Captain Vimes' fistmarks had been quite clearly defined on the other side of the doorway), but good indicators of emotion -, the clock on the wall, and a small device that had been a Hogswatch present from certain gentlemen of a bearded and pointy-hatted persuasion, which measured octarine concentration in the atmosphere and was currently glowing a violent shade of blue.

Upon some further investigation, Vetinari concluded that the little needle had gotten jammed in the top edge, and was vibrating.

"Fascinating," he said.

"My lord?"

"Nothing you need concern yourself with, Brian," he said, without turning around. "However... if you could arrange a carrying basket for Mr. Fusspot? I am in the mood for an airing, since the committees appear to be wheeling along smoothl - properl - as planned."

"Of course, sir."

**(1) The unfortunate story behind Marietta von Lipwig's unfortunate name is of some small historical interest. Eighteen years ago, a panicked Mr. von Lipwig discovered that his ever-helpful wife, Adora Belle Dearheart, was unconscious from the struggles of labor, which, while a welcome relief from the invective, nevertheless left him with the task of labelling the newborn, who was not, as they had been told to expect, a boy. If it had been a boy it would all have been perfectly fine; they had a good name picked out for a boy(2), a good, simple name, as befitted two parents who had suffered all their lives from their own parents' foolish choices. But it was a girl. And so, frenzied and surrounded by the horrible vision of a circle of ancient, dancing postmen who were encouraging him to 'name the girl' in lieu of encouraging him to 'kiss the girl', he cried out the first name that came to mind.**

**And. Well. Thus, and verily, are the sins of the father visited upon the third and fourth generation(3).**

**(2) Bob, if you must know.**

**(3) The Book of Ossory, 20:5, Unrevised Edition(4).  
**  
**(4) Translated in the **_**revised **_**edition as 'it's probably just as well you don't know your great-grandfather's name, miss.'**

*

William laid the packet down carefully and said, "I see."

"Yes, Mr. de Worde."

"Take it. Give it to the dwarfs. We'll see about - a separate issue, I think. Yes. See to it, please. Yes."

Fizz took the papers and lurched downstairs. William remained at his desk, reclined in his big and suitably menacing leather chair, eyes closed. He was thinking, and he was thinking in the primary colors of a man seduced.

He was thinking about heroes. About _superheroes._

A/N: The Plotting Moves! Hahahahaha not. Sorry for delay on chapter, my laptop threw a wobbler; I know that you were all waiting in BREATHLESS suspense and I am fully willing to pay your oxygen-deprivation caused medical fees, assuming you can hunt me down in my concrete bunk in the tropics with the legal details. :D


	10. Physics? What Physics?

**Chapter Nine: Physics? What Physics? (We Could All Do With A Drink)**

_In which the Piecemaker leaves buildings standing and Marvel Maiden arrives in blimp-popping style_**  
**  
"Shit!" Angua shouted over the noise, and then ran for the podium.

Pandemonium reigned in Sator Square. Clouds of smoke and other assorted vapors, few of them healthsome, rolled out from the site of the explosion, filling the air and obscuring vision. There was a stink of burning ozone: vivid copper and black in pretty fern patterns overlaying the mere sighted view of the world, which had in the intensification of her other senses faded to a grey outline. Her hands were trying to be paws. Her thumbs, at least, were succeeding. And who could blame her? It was a _mess._ Half the cobblestones had been blackened by a sooty chrysanthemum of burn marks; a metal grille near the epicenter of the bang was glowing cherry-red, and making sad little clink clink ptoo! noises as it cooled and popped its hinges one by one (not necessarily in that order). The remaining cobblestones were being blackened by the shadows of the crowd, which was stampeding for the alleys in the hopes of escaping whatever had very effectively blown its fuse in the intervening minutes.

But the figure standing at the soapbox was quite still. She elbowed her way through the clamor and swung herself up beside him. He turned to glare at her when she gripped his shoulder; said, unwisely, "How dare you?" She obligingly answered by punching him a good one across the kisser**(1)**.

He hit the floor and came up rolling, which was just as well, because otherwise he would have been trampled and that would have been a waste of a damn fine scapegoat. Before he could recover himself fully, though, to be sure, Angua hauled him up by the front of his shiny black armor or whatever it was and whistled.

Carrot hurried over - he'd been attempting some semblance of crowd control, but rightly recognized it as a hopeless cause at _best. _He handcuffed the miscreant in question for her, and she in turn let go of the bastard's collar.

"Now," she said - bellowed, really, the crowd had a fine set of lungs and the scene was not that of true terror, wherein people save their breath for the business of escaping; no, this havoc was the sort wrought by men, women, dwarfs, trolls, undead, and assorted others were quite secure in their general safety and therefore felt the burning need to complain about it. She pinched the bridge of her nose as she spoke, smudging her face further in a futile attempt to wipe some of the grime of combustion off it. "You're under arrest. Will you come quietly?"

"What am I under arrest for?" he hissed, voice quite strange from this distance, all strangled and nasty. That might have been because he appeared to be wearing a grill over his mouth. Behind the bars, pointy canines shone with inappropriate glee and twinkliness.

Her mind went back to the word 'twinkliness', circled it, held it up to the light, and shrugged. It had better things to do than question vocabulary under stress. "You're under arrest for -" she tried to concentrate over the noise and the onrush of odors "- Disturbing the Peace, Obstructing Duty, and -"

"Petty charges? A mere excuse for your corruption? The hell with _that,"_ he snapped in one long stream of stupidity, and kicked Carrot in the stomach, who stumbled backwards.

"I'll take that as a no," Angua said, and leapt on him.

It _should _have been a matter of moments to wrestle him to the ground; vampire though he might have been, Carrot was there to assist her before you**(2)** could say "police brutality". But...

But...

Every move he made seem to twist reality a little. His blows were ridiculous, straight-armed, impractical flailing things, like a child's drawing of a kick or an elbowing; yet every one landed home, and soon she was achingly aware that she was going to have to ask Detritus to darn her chain mail again, and probably Igor to darn some of her ribs. She could see, out of the corner of her eye, more reinforcements lumbering in. This was getting silly; it shouldn't take more than two experienced Watch officers to bring down some arrogant pipsqueak of a vampire.

What should have been didn't seem to have much effect here. His thrashing was kicking up sparks! And - was it just her, or did every hit he landed come with a little sound effect passing straight into her brain without bothering to enter by the ears? It was like there was an imp standing by to yell 'Pow!' 'Bang!' 'Punch!' with each gesture.

It was becoming increasingly difficult to resist the urge to _bite _him. As it were.

Then he suddenly slipped her grip in one balletic turn and launched himself into the sky.

"Damn," Commander Angua said. The vampire spread bat wings. The handcuffs split with an inappropriately jolly noise like bells and flutes and things. "_Damn. _Detritus?_"_

"Yes, sir?" Detritus rumbled. He _had _been cocking his crossbow. She glanced around. The square was more or less emptied except for the gathered watchmen, who all knew enough to stay behind Detritus, and the vampire was hovering still, smirking at them, floating just barely out of reach...

"Fire," she said, and dived to the ground as the troll swung _up _and moved his massive stone arms _so _and _so -_

The sound it should have made was boom. The noise it did make was 'fffft', as there was a very soft, sudden change in pressure and a fireball bloomed from out the quarrel. He'd been aiming almost vertically, and the surround property was, amazingly, more or less unscathed; a rain of feathers was pattering down on them, but that was no great problem, for anyone but the gargoyles who might go hungry for a few hours thanks to this particular sharp decrease in the seagull and pigeon population.

She looked, and saw, to her horror, that the buildings weren't the only things that had gone unscathed. The vampire was reclining in mid-air, wings spread out like a cushion or the low, curving back of a sofa; he grinned down at them, and said, "I'm afraid it would take more than such little toys to disable... _the Batty-Man."_

She stared at him.

The Piecemaker, as Detritus called it, had never failed to totally devastate anything in its path. It was the lone triumph of physics over narrative convention that had ever even shown its face on the surface of the Disc.

"You must be crazy," she informed him, "if you think that name is helping you any. Look, Mr. Batty-Man, what are you trying to achieve? Who are you?" How can you survive a bundle of flaming sticks at a very acceptable fraction of the speed of light to the head? she added to herself. How can you subdue Ankh-Morpork citizens into near complacent silence?

"Negotiating now, eh?" he said.

"Yes," she said frankly. "We apparently can't reach you by force, after all. Are you going to talk to us?"

"No," he said. "I've seen what you're like, now. You rejected the signalling device, didn't you?"

"I was going to have Ch-Sergeant Littlebottom analyze it for dangerous chemicals, I admit," Angua said. "Is that what you were annoyed about? Is _that _why you went postal all over the soapbox?"

"Someone has to speak out against you people," he said, eyes glowing. "Against Authority. Against the Old Regime. Against Wrong. Against Conservativism. Against Oppression and Stagnance. Against... Right-Wing Small-Closed-Mindedness."

"What?" said Angua, momentarily caught off guard by the last item on the list.

"Er," said the vampire, and then recovered himself. "Never mind that! I came to fight everything you represent. I thought you might be converted to the path of righteousness, but it appears that was wishful thinking. And so I bid you adieu - _for now."_

"That's a contradiction in Quirmian," Angua pointed out, testily, but he was gone. She sniffed, and memorized the signature of his scent; electric blue, shading to purple at the edges, with liberally applied metaphorical glitter in the bargain.

"Hi," said someone who had just tripped up to her shoulder, breathlessly. "Did we miss anything?"

"Kid," she said, turning around to look her former employer's son in the eye, "you have _no _idea."

**(1) His chin left a bruise on her knuckles. If it weren't for werewolf physiology, she probably would have broken a finger. "That'll teach me not to visit Mrs. Goodbody regularly," as she put it. And, indeed, it did. Were there ever a shop that did not suffer for business even during the worst of the Watch Commander's moods, it was that one. There's nothing like a blackjack and a peaceful proceeding in the Shades for spreading a little judicious misery through the world.**

**(2) Assuming 'you' were Detritus, who had trouble with all those consecutive vowels and always ended up resorting to the good old stand-by, "us hittin' dem."**

*

It was sort of orb-like. And, then again, not. Like a big glowing sphere in the wet green undersea maze of hallways and crumbling architecture, it was suspended from the top spire, all golden and rounded and translucent. It could also, not unreasonably, have been compared to a massive, really amazingly huge sort of bubble.

Vimes considered it. He was glued to one side, so there wasn't much else to consider. 'Glued' was definitely the word. It was sticky. At least, to his ghostly substance it was sticky. From what had happened to some passing seaweed, he suspected that to Real People it was not so much 'adhesive' as 'electrocuting and fatal'.

But that was okay, because he was intrigued by what was happening inside, which was, he presumed, the reason that his ephemeral goldfish pals had led him here in the first place and were now paddling worriedly around his head. The Ankhman was talking to someone, who had arrived by boat - specifically, by the pointy end of the boat**(1) **crashing through the lower side of the bubble and almost imploding it, although that particular crisis had been averted, to Vimes' mild spectator's disappointment.

The someone was now clambering out of the boat. The someone, it appeared, was female. Very. Very, female. Female, very. She wore a pink, white and blue - well, it wasn't so much a suit as a layer of paint, but anyway it was pink. And white. And blue. There were spangled stars on it, too. As a result of this, in combination with all the... bouncing... that was to say, female-ness... she resembled a collection of brightly-colored balloons constantly on the verge of loud popping. The only crack in that particular image was that she was dark-skinned under the paint, and had a great deal of shiny black hair, which rippled weirdly like a flag without accompanying breeze**(2)**.

Just glancing at her made Vimes want to wretch.

"Why was I summoned?" she said haughtily, her rich, honey-like voice as intensely annoying as could be expected.

"We are gathering," the Ankhman gurgled.

"Who arrrre _we?" _she said, tossing her fine if proportionally rather small head and rolling her 'r's like a hot bit of Distressed Pudding on her tongue.

"We are... the Justice League of Ankh-Morpork!"

"Is _this _Ankh-Morrrrporrrrk?" said the woman.

"No. no. Ankh-Morpork is near here. This is our headquarters, but Ankh-Morpork is a far grand -" he hesitated "- a far nobl -" he paused a second time "- a far more impress -" he came to a reluctant halt "- a far _larger _place than my humble abode."

"I see," she said flatly. "Four of us?"

"Indeed," he glooped, sounding relieved.

"Which am I?"

"You are... Marvel Maid..."

"Hmm," she said. "Who is the ghost watching us from the skylights?"

Vimes cursed. He'd thought himself mostly concealed in the shadow of a curving, impossible bookshelf - the interior of the 'headquarters' was lined with some sort of distorted study that had been stretched around the contours of the globe - but no such luck, it seemed. Of course.

The Ankhman swiveled around in his puddle to look at where his companion was pointing. "I don't see anything," he squelched.

"Of courrrrse you don't, you fool, you have eyes on eitherrr side of your head," said Marvel Maid. "There is one, neverrrrtheless."

"I'm sort of... stuck..." the Ankhman said, gesturing pathetically to the stretch of flesh which in lieu of concealing a spleen had turned soggy and was sucking at the carpet.

"Hmph," said Marvel Maid, and launched herself at Vimes.

The supernatural, however, won out where natural physics never good, and she propelled herself in a beautiful somersault through his outthrust arm, which fortunately also dislodged him from the staticky golden bubble.

"Can we talk about this?" he said, as she tried to slap him and found her hand coming through his nose. It was a peculiarly unpleasant experience, having his ectoplasm permeated so abruptly.

She removed something from her belt. It was a silver staff**(4), **diamond-studded, and lightning danced along the sides.

"Oh, hell," said Vimes, ducking as she took another swing at him and almost cut away a chunk of his shoulder plate. He _felt _the buzz where the staff brushed his shade of armor.

She was morphing even as she whirled and thrust. "A ghost, huh?" she murmured. "We know how to deal with spirrrrits. With souls. Oh, yesss..."

Tentacles, he thought, and indeed there were an excess of suction-cupped feelers in his face as soon as he thought it. Her paint-suit was splitting as thick limbs sprouted forth, coiling sinuously through the water, trailing bubbles, and so forth. Also, there were suddenly more heads than there had been.

There was a name for where she had come from, he knew.

_The Dungeon Dimensions._

He backed away as best he could through the thick water. She advanced.

Vimes imagined, for one instant, that the jewelled octopussies inset in the tiles framing her were also moving. And in that instant, before it could get worse, he vaulted backwards, and hoped beyond hope that what he had concluded from the evidence about postvital travel was true. The goldfish pinwheeled along. The last thing he saw as something in his essence tugged and shifted was the largest of the tentacles bubbling forth reach and twist around the liquid where his ankle had been, and the maw began to open.

Then he was spluttering onto the banks of the Ankh.

Right. That was that answered. Now all he had to do was find those _bloody _wizards.  
**  
(1) Vimes had survived seven sea voyages by the time he finally kicked it, maintaining his stubborn refusal to learn the nautical terms for things throughout. He wasn't about to start now just because he was dead and had a sense of perspective. There was such a thing as **_**principle.**_

**(2) In exactly the same way as the flag whips about in those videos of the first flight to the moon. Which, there being no wind on the moon to whip drapery with, proves that Roundworld space travel was all a FRAUD(3), a GOVERNMENT CONSPIRACY orchestrated toarghargh no not the straight jackets again. In any case! Her hair. Flag. Conspiracy. **_**It's all connected. **_**Like a string of sausages! Or, you know, a string of strings.**

**(3) Unlike on the Discworld, where it is merely an unfortunate fact resulting from Leonard da Quirm's obsession and many, many swamp dragons.**

**(4) Shut up. Yes, you. In the back. You were sniggering. Don't think I didn't see you there.**

A/N: I apologize for any detriment in quality my writing this with my ears full of snot may have made. Especially on the bit about Vimes and his bubbles, poor man. Update schedule seems to be shifting. Regularity? Hah! It's down there with physics, all sad and alone.


	11. Superheroes Have No Taste In Hostages

**Chapter Ten: Superheroes Have No Taste In Hostages**

_In which ex-Commander Vimes ruins a perfect moment and control of the city is negotiated like a particularly complex order of prawns or, perhaps, a sack of potatoes_

Mustrum Ridcully, Archchancellor of the Unseen University, white-bearded, pointy-hatted, and crossbow-toting, entered his office, carefully closed the door behind him, and unscrewed a small glass bottle of brandy, the liquid amber with gold highlights in the afternoon sun. _Drink me, _it seemed to say. _We'll have lots of fun together, and in the morning, someone else will be having the hangover. _He regarded it fondly for a moment and lifted it to his lips.

"Hello, you can see me?" the late Commander Vimes said briskly, unfolding from out the wall.

There was a crunching noise as his glass hit the polished hardwood, and a splash as his mouthful of brandy hit the wall**(1).**

"Unfortunately, yes," he managed, when he had recovered himself. "I must say I hadn't expected to see you again, Sam. What're you here for?"

"Heard about the vigilante who was rabble-rousing earlier?" Vimes said, smiling in a friendly fashion. Ridcully could see the corner of his desk through the man's translucent teeth.

"Yes?" Ridcully ventured.

"Turns out he has some friends," said Vimes.

"Yes?"

"And they have _tentacles._"

"Ah. Think it's the damn' Dungeon Dimensions again, do you?" Ridcully said, feeling himself to be on slightly more solid territory there. Vimes' grin was not a pretty sight, although, in fairness, there was not a lot of it to see, because it was mostly blue outlines.

"_Yes. _And my _son _is getting involved with these things."

"Are you sure it's not just a case of a mad octopussy?" Ridcully tried.

"It tried to eat me! Can mad octopussies eat ectoplasm?"

"Is that what you are now?" said Ridcully, intrigued. "Somehow I always pictured ectoplasm as, well, stickier. Like a cross between glue and that rather nasty powder blue jello Mr. Dibbler has taken to selling now that the Animal Rights' group are after him about the genuine pork products and things."

"I don't think that's the question you should be asking right now," Vimes ground out.

"Well, of course, as Head of all Known Wizardry**(2),** I have a duty to -"

He was interrupted by shouting outside.

"What are you going to -" he began, but Vimes had already gone to the window, and was swearing.

"What can you do," the man said, turning back slowly, "to stop them?"

"Well, I could -"

"Good," said Vimes. Then he jumped through the glass with a weird shimmer and landed through several unfortunate bystanders below. Once he was sure his boots had hit the cobblestones - or rather, hit the cobblestones beneath the top layer of cobblestones, since Vimes'd overshot by a few inches - he ran toward the heart of the commotion.

"- ask Stibbons what his damnfool machine could do about it," Ridcully finished. And began to hum the cheerful little tune that precedes the joyous process of making someone else's life a small and private hell.

He strolled downstairs and out to the good old H.E.M, home to every hole in the fabric of space, time, and Surprise that had appeared in the last few decades, to say nothing of the ones in Ponder's socks. He banged on the door with his staff, incidentally obliterating some funny looking sigil someone had carved there**(3).**

"Yes?" said Ponder Stibbons, easing the door open with his foot because his hands were occupied with holding the corpses of two identical dead chickens. "Oh, hello, Archchancellor."

Ridcully stared at the chickens, which were bringing back uncomfortable memories of the good old days when it took a lot more than some wood shavings and a fresh egg to summon up the Last Reality or a teaspoon of zinc carefully misapplied to conjure up seven naked, if temporary, virgins. "What d'you want those for?"

"Hex only prints messages about intellectual property rights unless we feed the ants raw meat," said Ponder, blushing. "We're working on refining the, uh, process, but until then -"

"Intellectual property rights?"

Ponder's brow creased faintly, like an inexperienced ironer's first embarrasingly stained bedsheet under the heated metal. In all honesty, he had no idea. But it was a matter of pride to never admit that to the Archchancellor. "It's the, um, the right to dream your own dreams and write them down and then sue people who steal the bit about the toothy carrots," he said.

"I never dream about toothy carrots," said Ridcully. "Toothy hats, now, toothy hats is basic wizardly dreamin'. But carrots? Can't say I approve of carrots -"

"No," Ponder sighed, "that was an _example, _Archchancellor, I certainly wasn't accusing you of stealing carrots. Look, it's like pentagles, all right? Hex has started drawing pentagles inside h-inside its own brain. Er. Glass tubing, that is. And now it's all mixed up because of the divisions, but raw meat makes it better."

"Hmm," said Ridcully. "Pentagles, you say?"

"Yes! Pentagles!"

"But, Ponder, that's not -" a pale and faintly mushroom-like student peeking over his shoulder began.

"Shut up," Ponder said.

"Right then," Ridcully said. "Forget the chickens. Or don't forget the chickens. We have a crisis on our hands."

"A crisis?" Ponder said, stepping out of the doorway and carefully placing the chickens on a rather pretty silver tea tray embossed with climbing roses and the like labeled 'INBOX'. There were also some cans of processed meat piled neatly in one corner. Ridcully, with uncharacteristic wisdom, did not ask.

"Dungeon Dimensions beasties. Apparently those fellows in funny clothing are being aided by alien monsters."

"Why do you say that?" Ponder said, blinking, cutting some slivers of flesh off the breast of one chicken and dumping them into a little flap set in one tube. "Have they started devouring people, or something?"

"They tried to eat Duke Vimes' tormented spirit," said Ridcully. "Or so I'm told. I didn't see it myself."

"Duke -?" said Ponder, and then, "oh."

He frowned. Ponder Stibbons, man of reason, lone pioneer of the unexplored islands of rationality that float on the sea of common thaumaturgy like scum on pondwater, was not a fan of tormented spirits or, indeed, spirits. It was so messy, the business with the distinction between mind and brain and soul and spinal column. But there was no helping it. Facts were Facts.

"Vimes told you they were from the Dungeons Dimensions?" he said, trying to remember the man. Ponder had gotten a general impression of widespread irritation, much of it directed at magic. He hadn't seemed the sort to know what the Dungeons Dimensions were, let alone what marked their presence bulging through the thin walls of this reality.

"Not in so many words," said Ridcully. "But I saw right through his talk."

"No doubt," said Ponder absently.

"I _saw, _right, I saw right _through _his talk," Ridcully said.

"Yes?" said Ponder.

Ridcully rolled his eyes and wiggled his bushy eyebrows impressively. "Never mind. Look, the point is, he expects us to do something about it."

"We'd have to find the source of the rift," Ponder said, considering. "And destroy them utterly until they are as little grease stains on the face of the Disc. But in a scientific fashion, of course."

"Of course," said Ridcully, and grinned through his beard.

**(1) To Vimes' mild disappointment, a ghostly version of the same substance quite failed to appear on his plane of existence. Little did he know that somewhere far away, One Man Bucket was doing an Authentic Native Dance of joy and... brief intoxication. Uh.**

**(2) Which was to say, head of all wizards who knew that he was their head. Which was to say, head of all known Ridcully, since the others were unlikely to oblige.**

**(3) Thirteen rather puzzled dwarfs would later stop by, examine the dent in the polished green paint for a while, and then shrug and move off, while the God of Unwise Crossovers stamped his foot and said "Foiled again!" **

*****

Kark Clentt, who without Sam's noticing had woven out of the clearing minutes before the explosion, caught up with the Batty-Man a few rooftops away, the tails of his grey suit flapping behind him as he scrambled up a gutter pipe and came to rest a few feet from his new friend.

The Batty-Man was removing his cloak. He turned. "Oh, hello, Kark," he said.

He was nervous. Good.

"Hello, Voose," said Kark cheerily, clapping the vampire on the back. "That didn't go as well as it could have, did it."

"No," the Batty-Man shivered.

"But, of course, there is always plan B."

"But -"

"Don't _worry,_" Kark said. "Plan A was... flawed. I know what you hoped. And it is true that the people of Ankh-Morpork can be suppressed by narrativium - however, it is difficult to rouse them with it. It steals away too much of their coherent thought, you see. Besides, it didn't fit in with the story properly. We are here to save the city from itself. You cannot expect them to choose it, in your degraded state. We are not mere ringleaders and mob elders, Voose. We are better than that!"

"We are?" the Batty-Man said hopefully. He unhooked his mask and removed it.

"We _are," _Kark agreed. "That's why we're going to go and threaten Vetinari until he hands the city to us on a platter, instead. Now change into your millionaire clothes while I suit up. We need to give them a bit of a show, after all. Eh?"

"Right," said Voose, his voice faint with overtones of terror.

Kark smiled at him, and kicked open the skylight in front of him, revealing a ladder into a richly furnished bedroom which, conveniently enough, belonged to Voose Brayne. "There being no phone boxes nearby..." He gestured to the ladder.

"Phone boxes?" Voose said blankly.

Kark reminded himself that Voose didn't know the Story, and shook his head. "Never mind. Just go and change, will you?"

"Of course," Voose said, descending. Kark watched him go, turned to look at the skyline, and became a man in a pink and blue ensemble with a glassy smile who didn't think like normal people think.

"Let us go forth!" he said, when Voose had reappeared, looking like the rather frightened, rather young man trying to look cool that he was, in a trim bottle-green coat and a terribly greasy hairstyle.

"Uhm. Right," said Voose. "Forth! Yes!"

"Run along to the Tower of Art," said the superhero. "I'll meet you there once I've collected Vetinari, hmm?"

Voose nodded uneasily. The superhero jumped off the ledge and took flight, his cape unfurling behind him like a flag of surrender that had been left in the wash with something red**(1).**

He didn't fly like a vampire, or, indeed, like anything in the world. He flew with his arms held straight out in front of him, fists clenched, jaw set in an expression of noble constipation, his toes in their pink boots pointed, cape fluttering in a way that was not at all aerodynamic. He flew like a bad special effect in a cheesy sci-fi movie that had had seven first-minute budget cut; he moved across the sky like a doll on a string or a stop-motion animation of someone diving horizontally through the air.

But however he flew, it was fast. Within moments, the Palace gardens were unrolling beneath him like green baize on Mustrum Ridcully's desk before he got out the pool balls, verdant except for where various genuine Johnsons**(2)** had recently combusted and laid bare the raw loam. It was a nice view. The superhero ignored it, hovering in mid-air; his eyes were focused only on a black-swathed figure moving slowly and impressively across a lawn, preceded by a mere yellow smudge that was all Mr. Fusspot III registered as at this altitude, even for the superhero's eagle-sharp vision and the superhero's eagle-true aim.

Below...

Vetinari did not bother to look up as the atmosphere changed and the air started to crackle around his ears. Instead, he strolled over to a stone bench he was pretty sure was dwarf-made and sat gingerly, placing his cane across his knees and bundling up Mr. Fusspot III in his arms.

He scratched under the mutt's chin. It panted hot air into his face and slobbered all over his knuckles so vigorously that its face almost turned inside out.

"Where can he be?" he murmured, as the Teacher's Guild gong struck twelve.

"Here," said the superhero, and touched to earth on pointed toes.

"Ah, there you are," said Vetinari, rising again, Mr. Fusspot III firmly tucked under one arm.

The superhero strode forward, grabbed the Patrician by the collar of his robe of office, and began, "Stand where you are, foul tyrant, or I will -!"

"No," said Vetinari, pleasantly, loosening his collar with one hand so as to ease the sudden pressure on his neck a little, "it doesn't work like that, does it?"

The superhero stopped flailing and looked sideways at him. For a moment, there was a flicker of Kark Clentt in his broad, glistening face. "What? What doesn't work like that?"

"This," said Vetinari. "I am a helpless old man, and you are the aggressor. Be careful, Mr. Clentt. There is still space for villains in your planned drama. _Isn't _there."

"_You _are the villain," the superhero said, rallying. "I am... _Manly Man!_, and I will drag you to justice!"

"No," Vetinari said, patiently. "You will walk with me to justice. Slowly, I hope. My legs are not what they were. You will not lay another finger on me. Indeed, you will not need to. I do not intend -" he flashed a sharklike smile "- to put up a _fight, _Mr. Clentt."

"Oh, no you don't," Manly Man growled, hauling him up until they were eye to eye (which, since Manly Man was seven feet tall, meant that Vetinari's soft soles were a few inches from the grass). "Don't try to talk your way out of my dragging. I've had this dragging planned for a long time. You are the nemesis. I don't need to listen to you. Why should I listen to you? You are a mad dictator, you are ruining this city -"

"No doubt. But right now the facts of the matter do not, aha, matter. It's all so very Uncertain, if you understand me."

They stared at each other.

The superhero, with great care, lowered Vetinari back to the ground.

"Thank you," said Vetinari. "And now, Mr. Clentt, feel free to lead the way."

**(1) A surprisingly frequent occurrence, given what often happens to people who come carrying flags of surrender on the Discworld, where victors like to make their point directly.**

**(2) To be precise: an ornamental fountain, the crazy paving, a small metal statue of what Vetinari always understood to have been intended as a tree and which resembled a small gnome in terrible spirits, and the head gardener, after a fall in the moo-ha-ha(3).**

**(3) Deeper, longer, and involving far more spikes and electrodes than even the most deadly of ho-hos.**

*****

"I don't think we have time for this," said Carrot, halfway through Commander Angua's explanation, just as she was getting to the good part, to Sam's irritation. He jerked a thumb at the the road.

Captain Sally von Humpeding, helmetless and even paler than usual, tailed by Constable Visit, was racing towards them. "Message in from Buggy!" she shouted, waving a scrap of paper over her head. "Says he saw someone marching Vetinari towards the Tower of Art. And someone else at the Tower is demanding that we come for a hostage negotiation."

"_What?_" said Angua.

"Beats the hell out of me," said Sally, shrugging eloquently. "But we'd better go."

"Fine, yes," the Commander snapped, "but is something wrong with Visit? He looks a bit ashen. Is he swaying?"

"He tried to get in their way," said Sally. "He should be fine once he's gotten over the shock of having his pamphlet set on fire in front of him."

Angua blinked. "This kidnapper person set the pamphlet on fire?"

"No, he says it was Vetinari that did that," said Sally. "Don't look at me, I'm just the messenger. Come on!"

It was a short run, although it was made longer by the necessity of acquiring other watchmen along the way and Angua telling them in terse sentences**(1)** what was going on, insofar as anyone understood it. Sam certainly didn't. He had a sneaking suspicion that Marietta did, from the smug expression on her face.

They pounded in only a few minutes after the sometime kidnapper arrived and had prodded Vetinari up to the top step of the front entrance to the Tower, a process made tedious because Vetinari kept moving in the correct direction a second too early and when he got irritated he often prodded the man the other way from spite, which might have relieved his feelings somewhat, since Vetinari was a most compliant prisoner, but did not make for efficient stair-climbing.

"Let me introduce myself," said a slightly built man slouching against the crumbling brickwork while the kidnapper, who, it dawned on Sam, was wearing pink and blue, loomed menacingly over Vetinari's shoulder. "I am -"

"I know who you are," Angua barked. "We meet again, eh, Mr. Batty-Man?"

"You don't know that that's who I am!" he said, taken aback.

"Yes, I do," she sighed. "I am a _werewolf, _Mr. Batty-Man. We have very good memories for vampiric scents."

"You're pregnant," he said, waving a thin hand. "You're unreliable."

"Excuse me?" she snarled. "What the hell is _that _particular comment supposed to imply?"

The Patrician coughed delicately. "Hostage negotiation, usurpation, saving of city," he murmured.

"Right. Right," said the Batty-Man, shaking his head like a dog coming out of a river**(2).** "The terms of this negotiation are very simple. The Watch will be disbanded; you will turn in your weapons and sign certain papers asserting that you will make no further attacks against the New Regime. The Guild heads and Council members, when they have received our message and assembled here -" and Angua saw, out of the corner of her eye, that such noted citizens were indeed gravitating towards the area "- will sign over the Patricianship."

"To who?"

"To me. Voose Brayne," he said, firmly. She snorted. He ignored her. "A respected citizen and quite eligible for the job. All nice and legal."

"Except for the part about blackmail being, you know, a crime," Marietta murmured, under her breath. Sam snorted, but his eyes were on the Voose fellow.

The name struck him as familiar. And then it hit him (far too much metaphorical striking going on, really). That was the name of the vampire who had recommended Kark Clentt for the job...

Oh, hells.

"And if we don't sign?" said a voice from the crowd.

"Ah, Mrs. Battye**(3),** I thought someone might say that, for this city is fallen into vice and depravity, as we have said. If you don't sign, we will kill him," said Voose, smugly.

There was a thoughtful silence.

"...and?" said another tremulous voice, eventually identified as Lord Downey's. There was a general consensus to this sentiment among the gathered, though.

"Thank you," said Vetinari, to no one in particular.

The superhero all in pink and blue leapt down and whispered something into Voose's ear.

"We will _start _by killing him," he corrected himself, after listening for a moment. "And then we will kill the rest of you. Your police will not be able to stop us. Believe me."

"What, just the two of you?" said Downey.

"We have friends," said Voose, "in high places."

On cue, someone appeared on the horizon, her hair curling richly around her heart-shaped brown face, her star-spangled uniform glittering, and most importantly, her additional appendages that had so recently burst through her fragile human skin, nowhere to be seen.

Sam thought he could hear soft theme music in the background. He glared at the apparition. She smiled sweetly at the crowd, while electricity played around her fingers.

Then she zapped Constable Bluejohn with a sizzling bolt, frying the hair on a few of the surrounding populace. Constable Bluejohn, who was a troll, made a pinking noise. And fell over face-first.

"I hope we will get along, ladies, gentlemen," she said. "We arrre worrrking forrrrryourr _rrights_, afterrr all."

**(1) But not that terse, because there had to be room for the words not strictly appropriate for small children.**

(2) Always assuming the river one other than the Ankh. Dogs that come out of the Ankh are slime monsters, dead, or named Gaspode and 'gifted' with sixteen and a half mild skin disease and the Power.

**(3) Head of the Needlewomen's Guild, an unusually difficult position, even among the twisting power webs all Guild heads had to deal with, what with all the supplicants who come knocking for precisely the wrong reasons and the shortage of proper darning mushrooms for hitting aforesaid supplicants around the ear with.  
**


	12. So Maybe Bastards United Can Be Ignited!

**Chapter Eleven: So Maybe Bastards United _Can_ Be Ignited! So What!  
**

_In which the Fool capers through with a convenient catastrophe on hand, and the kidnappers misplace their kidnappee_**  
**  
"_Which _rights?" Downey said, sounding genteelly horrified as he turned to look at the prone, rocky, green-grey shape of Constable Bluejohn.

"Natural ones?" Vetinari murmured.

"Truth, Liberrrty, and Justice," said the woman rising over the skyline, with immense satisfaction. She touched down soon after, apparently content with the waves she had made, and joined her brethren at the base of the tower, standing shoulder to shoulder with Manly Man. They were well-matched, after all.

Her words lingered.

And there were other words were hanging unspoken and thick in the air, now. You could have cut apart hovering syllables, if you had a hacksaw handy. The idea was... familiar. No one was saying anything, even under their breath - too much concentrated terror; and many people not saying more or less the same thing makes a quiet and undeniable sound, or rather, makes a very loud silence.

It was History, see? People remembered. What goes around comes around. Even the Patrician tensed at that.

So Sam was the only one, lost in the confusion that followed this announcement, who saw his father's ghost hop from windowsill eight stories down as if it were a shallow step and barrel through the crowd toward him.

"Sam, you need to -"

"Are you Commander Vimes?" Marietta blurted, shocked. At least she kept her voice down, although the layered hush around their ears covered most of it anyway. Sam uttered something technically unspeakable**(1)** under his breath. He'd almost forgotten about his companion in this mess.

"Yes," said Vimes. "Who the hell are you? No, don't answer that. Look, Sam, can you create a distraction like the last one?"

"No," Sam whispered, unhappily. "The person who helped me ran off afterwards."

Vimes swore. "Well, we'll just have to think of something."

"Why? What do you want to do?"

"I'd like to get Vetinari out," Vimes said. "And there's a chance - a slim one, I grant - that the wizards might be able to do something in the way of damage control if the bastards don't end up deciding to just kill everyone here and now. But if I know some of those Council members they're not going to back down, because they're idiots, unless they have proof that their skins are in peril. Which they don't."

"They don't?" Sam said.

"That's rather hard on the Guild heads," Marietta said.

"Says you. You haven't spent twenty years of your life bickering with these people, so don't push it, whippersnapper. It makes everything easier if we just remove the man standing between them and those _superheroes,_" Vimes said. He hadn't answered Sam's question, but Sam realized that, in a way, he didn't need to.

Who would believe that Vetinari could die? And no one had ever accused Downey and his ilk of being quick on the uptake. There would be a massacre before the Patrician had hit the ground. Besides, Sam didn't have any real objections to saving the man he'd grown up calling Uncle Havelock from bloody death, regardless of the obvious motive for it of Not Being Blackmailed With Pictures Involving Nappies. He just didn't know why his father didn't.

"Besides, a distraction will give my - will give Angua's men a chance to act," Vimes added.

"Well, I suppose that makes... sense..." Sam said, slowly. "Kind of. But I don't have any more explosive stuff."

"Then we'll just have to improvise," Vimes said.

As it turned out, though, they never got a chance to try their hand at the business of diversion, because a figure with emerald hair and a heavily made up face chose that moment to emerge from the crowd and offer Voose Brayne a smile that stretched from ear to ear.

"Jacko!" Sam called, forgetting himself. Marietta slammed a hand over his mouth, but the damage was done.

"Hell_ooo, _Sam!" Jacko said, smacking his lips and grinning horribly. "Leave me to my fate, would you?"

"Er, would I?"

"I'll see you later. Hell_ooo, _Mr. Brayne!" Jacko said, shimmering forward. Sam became aware, somewhat too late, that he was being trailed by six silent clown-faced, black-suited men, each of whom was carrying a ladder under one arm and a hose running back to a nearby building under the other; 'too late' in this case meaning 'not until he almost fell over several well-placed rungs'.

"Who are you?" said Voose. "What do you want?"

Jacko giggled. Sam stared at him and thought about how the only way to recognize a clown was by his mask. His dad had told him stories**(2)** of when the Watch was just starting, how a murderer had worn the nose and the caking of greasepaint and gone unrecognized until someone shot him down with a demon machine.

It was Jacko's voice, all right, but it wasn't his words and it wasn't his quite pleasant laugh.

"I just want to talk to you, Mr. Brayne." He fished into his suit, which was rather charred, Sam, saw, and produced a something small, white, and rectangular. "This is my card..."

Voose stared at what had been pressed into his thin hand. "A tarot card?" he said, holding it up to the light and probably in Marietta's range of vision.

"What's on it?" Sam hissed.

"The Fool," Marietta said, and even as she finished speaking Jacko echoed her.

"The Fool. Yes. You know where to find me."

"Subtle," Sam muttered.

"What did you expect? They're heroes," she replied without turning to look at him, intent on the tower.

"_He's_ not!"

"No, but at this rate he's going to shape up to be a villain," Marietta said.

"What the hell -"

"Why would I want to find a fool?" Voose demanded, having finished his examination of the card.

"The Fool," Jacko corrected.

The Manly Man started to rumble. There was something subtly pleased in his wide-legged stance. "Are you challenging his rule?"

"Hold on," Downey said, having apparently recovered from the surprise of seeing a troll's brain temporarily fried by someone's little finger, "have we agreed on his, you know, ruling, then?"

"I wouldn't dream of it in any case," said Jacko, raising his hands. "No, indeed. I'm challenging _you, _Mr. Brayne. You deserve a challenger. A _real _challenger. Not like these weak-minded sheep, ahaha!"

"I don't know what you mean," Voose said. "These are my people -"

"Oh, Mr. Brayne, I don't mean all this ambitious city governance you have going," Jacko said. "You'll see what I mean... soon enough. Though you haven't made it easy, you know. The reek of corruption is coming if you aren't careful, Mr. Brayne!" He somersaulted forward, limbs flying like the blades of a windmill just before the shit hit, and landed at the bottom of the stairs.

He bowed.

"Sorry to interrupt your little political negotiations," he said, "but I find it is sometimes necessary to make, you know, a statement properly, without reservations. At 'em, boys!"

There was a slick, oily noise, as six caps were simultaneously unhooked and six streams of diamond-clear liquid bubbled across the cobblestones. It looked like... vodka?

Sam got down on one knee and, true to breeding, stuck a finger in the sticky mess and licked it before making a face.

"Alcohol. Look," he said to his father, who had been observing events with interest, "I think it's now or never if we want to get Vetinari out in one piece."

"I don't think liquor fumes will kill him," Vimes said.

"Ja-the Fool likes burning things," Sam snapped.

"Oh, gods. I was going to ask - this is the one who helped you arrange the explosion earlier? You know him?"

"Yes."

"Good as we're going to get, I suppose," Vimes said, as Voose descended until he was face to face with the Fool. He moved off through the gathering. Sam made as if to follow him, and Marietta put a very firm hand on his shoulder.

"These people are going to need are help more than the Patrician in a moment."

"You must be joking," Sam said. "He's your boss!"

"And?"

"What do you _want_?" Voose said, from the front. He seemed lost, though Manly Man was confident, cheery, in all his posing anger. "Why are you challenging me? What is this -"

"This," the Fool interrupted, soft and sweet, "is fire."

He held a match up and struck it on his bare hand, which was implausible but ranked low in comparison to the rest of the day, before holding it under Voose's astonished nose.

Then he dropped it on the alcohol that was starting to pool around his massive shoes, and cartwheeled with considerable grace across the one dry line of pavement spreading fluid had left him. Voose became a sudden dark blur; his compatriots mobilized into streaks of pink and blue behind him.

The match fell impossibly slow, spinning through the air like a feather floating down or a spoon sinking through custard, and landed with a tiny splash.

The fires that sprang up a panicked heartbeat after were a flickering, eerie pale blue that shaded to violet and unwholesome orange at the peaks. Bluebell flames, the journalist in Sam thought dizzily. That was the term. Sky-colored**(3)** fire, blossoming across the slick surface of spilled spirits, licking the air, sudden sheets of flame springing up without warning but a soft implosion of air as the surrounding oxygen was consumed.

"Bloody hell," said Sam. No one heard him: the crowd clogging the plaza had just found its tongues at last. Men, women, trolls, dwarves, vampires, werewolves, zombies, gargoyles, gnomes, gnolls, watchmen**(4)**, and Others who had been transfixed with horror found themselves able to move, and squandered their opportunity in classical fashion by running around like the well known example of rutabagas**(5)** with the heads cut off.

"The Watch is evacuating and starting bucket chains," Marietta shouted at him over the wave of solid noise, as hot whipped around them and Sam danced back wildly, trying to avoid burning his boots or other important accoutrements, like his legs, right off.

"Should we join them?" Sam bellowed back.

"Can you think of anything more useful to do?" she screamed. She was very good at projection. Healthy set of lungs on her, all right.

He glanced at the steps of the Tower. Vetinari had disappeared.

"Unfortunately, no!"

"Right then!"

They elbowed their way through to where Constable Bluejohn was lumbering to his feet and had just been turned, with spare consideration for his fragile condition, into a riot shield for the second time that day.

**(1) Not that that had ever stopped anyone. It was the planet where **_**Dwarfish**_**, language of apostrophes and dashes where lesser tongues used vowels, was **_**invented**_**. What do you expect?**

**(2) Heavily edited, after Sybil had walked in during a particularly colorful rendition of the Time A Great Bloody Fire-Breathing Lizard Tried To Eat Your Mum.  
**  
**(3) A romanticization on Sam's part. The sky was in fact a mournful purple-grey with a slight resemblance to nine-day-old Distressed Pudding. But since Lord Olaf Quimby, with all his fondness for literal honesty, was centuries in the grave and the young journalist wisely did not make the observation allowed, such a lapse can perhaps be forgiven in light of other considerations and so forth.**

**(4) Coppers is **_**different, **_**as Detritus so eloquently put it. Commander Vimes' total failure to recognize political correctness or, indeed, political anything and anything correctness was an amazingly effective equalizer, a fact that warmed the Patrician inside, just another happy little addition to the overwhelming evidence for his opinion of Humanity and Associated Sapient Thingamajiggs.**

**(5) Bet you were expecting chickens, huh? Huh? Hah! Chickens! I ask you! When there's the well known case of the animated rutabaga, that most wholesome of vegetables, which flails admirably with the head off. And with the head on, for that matter. Probably because rutabagas don't really have heads. In any case...**

*

Retrace the narrative's imaginary steps to the split second when the ghost of Sam Vimes Sr. darted into the clamor.

He ran. Vimes liked running, although it lacked a certain corporal satisfaction in death, it was still better than anything else. It wasn't as if he had to worry about people getting in his way.

He stopped at the periphery of the empty space around the Tower where Ankh-Morpork citizens' natural inquisitiveness had met and been crushed by a healthy sense of terror. Marvel Maid and Manly Man were still supervising Vetinari...

_Whoomph, _went the alcohol so casually spilled a moment earlier.

Ah.

The superheroes gave chase. He might almost have approved of the terrier-like idiocy such behavior exhibited, had he not been so bloody infuriated with them already.

He went to the foot of the stairs and said, "Oi! Your Lordship!"

There was _no way _that bastard wouldn't be able to see him.

"Ah, Sir Samuel," said Vetinari, courteously. "Did you want something?"

"Yes! Get down from there!"

Vetinari considered this. "Why, may I ask?"

Vimes did a passable splutter. "Because you've got quite a good chance of dying if you stay here?"

"It doesn't seem to have slowed you down. How are you finding the afterlife? Busy?"

"You -"

"Refrain, please," Vetinari said, lifting a delicate hand. "I'm not sure I could take the strain. In any case, Your Grace, I wouldn't dream of missing out on the fun."

"_Fun_?!" Vimes didn't, generally speaking, approve of interrobangs and multiple exclamation points all in a row and so forth, but he was willing to make exceptions for exceptional circumstances. Like Havelock sodding Vetinari finally going senile.

"Oh, indeed," Vetinari said easily. "They are doing quite well, all things taken into account. I imagine I'll enjoy seeing how they fare once they've moved on to a larger scale."

Or, worse, _not_ going senile. Vimes glared at his former employer. "You can mock them in the Library," he snapped. "From a safe distance. I'm sure the wizards have an omniscope you can use."

"What a lot of bother," said Vetinari. "I believe it quite probable that they won't kill me. Why so urgent, then?"

"Angua and her lot won't do anything while they're holding you hostage," Vimes growled. "Happy?"

"Very well," said Vetinari, in the tones of one much put-upon. "If you insist."

"I do."

He eased himself off the side of the crumbling stone stairs, and was staring expectantly at him sooner than Vimes had expected.

"Shall we?"

"Er," Vimes said, glancing over his shoulder.

"Yes, which way were you planning on taking?" he inquired, admiring the flames that now ringed the Tower and were oozing slowly closer.

Vimes glared harder.

"Don't let me discourage you," he added, ever helpful.

"Underground," Vimes managed at last, once he'd finished squelching the urge to try and strangle his former employer, ectoplasm or no ectoplasm. "There'll be a way through the cellars, since your Undertaking doesn't go past University limits**(1)**, and the Library's only a hundred yards from here."

"Ah, but of course," Vetinari said. "Lead on."

Vimes tramped into the Tower, straight through the oak door. Fortunately the locks on it had crumbled long ago, and Vetinari followed.

There was a hole in the floorboards.

"Thought so," Vimes said. "Thirteen dwarfs with identity problems came up through that a few weeks ago, and no one gets around to fixing things before the paperwork had been lost at least five times around here. C'mon."

They descended, an asymmetric pair, into the gloom.

**(1) A sensible precaution when dealing with so much geography in so little mileage. Trains, even underground, mystic-driven ones, just aren't built to deal with that sort of thing. The routes circumvented the Empirical Crescent for a similar reason, although in the case of the Empirical Crescent the trains came out not only much later than expected but also in entirely different configurations, often bloody with the gore of passengers who foolishly stuck their hands and other extremities outside the car, totally failing to note the warning signs plastered on their faces by a helpful watchman.**

A/N: I'm sorry for the repetitiveness, but I'm told one can never have too many explosions, and this one is important! Really! Anyhow, it's not a _proper _explosion. Right?


	13. Disqualified As Gallows Humor

**Chapter Twelve: This Was Disqualified As Gallows Humor Because It Involves No Actual Gallows**

_In which old... colleagues... traverse the underground realms not very amiably and omniscience creates new problems, to no one's great surprise_**  
**  
Classically, Ankh-Morpork was said to be built on loam. Popularly, Ankh-Morpork was said to be built on Ankh-Morpork. In most areas of the city, both sayings were now inaccurate.

Ankh-Morpork was built on Vetinari's Undertaking. In all senses.

But because this was Ankh-Morpork, there were a few districts where even dwarfish ingenuity could not force the tunnels through, and level upon level of cellars had gone untouched, the gloom undisturbed by engineering curses and candles worn on helmets or, indeed, by anyone.

Until today, that was.

_Gloop, _went the greenish water leaking through the mossy walls. _Gloop, _went the Patrician's shoes as he stepped off the last stair down from ground level and out over a particularly slimy patch.

"I must say, I hadn't expected you to go the spectral way," he said to his transparent companion, looking faintly disapproving. "It would appear that I now owe Drumknott a hundred dollars."

"You were betting on my afterlife?" said Vimes.

"Call it competitive theorizing," said Vetinari. "An informal sort of wager."

"And _you_ thought..."

"Zombie," Vetinari said smoothly. "The logical choice, based on your history of sheer bloody-minded denial. But of course I was neglecting to take into account that logic has very little to do with matters of the spirit." He sighed.

"I am _not_ in denial!" Vimes said, once he'd had time to deconstruct the last two sentences he'd heard and circle the enraging bits, and strode on as angrily as possible. He had to stride angrily back, though, because Vetinari had stopped and fallen weakly against the wall, the better to have a suspicious coughing fit into his black-sleeved arm.

"Oh, indeed," he said, when he had recovered. "Death, I understand, does wonders for one's self-awareness."

Vimes glared at him, but having no response walked through the hanging lichens and things in silence, incorporeal corpus shimmering weirdly when vegetation penetrated it.

There were distant, muffled crashes from above. And screams.

"Your city is on fire, you know."

"_My _city?" said Vetinari, raising an eyebrow. "Dear me, are you renouncing your share so soon?"

"I'm dead. Watch the ceiling, by the way."

Vetinari inclined his head just enough to avoid concussing himself on a low beam. "You don't say?"

"I have rights! I'm supposed to be able to rest in peace!"

"I suspect you implicitly give up those privileges when you get out and about post aforesaid demise, Vimes. Just a hunch."

"Oh, shut up."

"As you wish."

Brief, blessed quiet: then a muffled _fwoom, _as of something highly flammable, well, flaming.

"That'll be Bearhugger's. Are you really not worried about all - this?" Vimes gestured futilely in an attempt to describe, in one vague flapping motion, superheroes, supervillains, combustion, and impending wizardly intervention, possibly the most terrifying of the four.

"I have great faith in your son's attending to events admirably."

"Hah!"

"Don't underestimate a journalist in the right place, Sir Samuel."

"I can't imagine what use one'd be in a wildfire, except as added fuel," Vimes said morosely. "And will you stop calling me that?"

"Not if I can help it, Sir Samuel. In any case I was not talking about the fire but the ashes. What one needs in the aftermath of certain kinds of disaster is someone to write it all down."

"'s not what I'd call interesting reading. No, you don't want writers for disasters. A troll with a clipboard, that'd be a favorite. But writers?"

"To write down what led up to the catastrophe," Vetinari said patiently, "and why the motives of the heroes who took care of it should be questioned regardless of their courage etcetera."

"I've never heard anyone say etcetera before," Vimes said. Then he said: "Oh. I _see._"

"Quite."

"Well, that makes sense. I suppose. Maybe. Why are you pinning it on Sam, though? I'd imagine de Worde will manage to annoy everyone in standard fashion. Always in top form, that man."

"The _Times _has always had trouble differentiating between the truth and the facts of the matter," Vetinari said. "They generally muddle their way through in the end, but Sam has certain natural advantages in that area. I must admit to curiosity as to why you are _letting _me put the responsibility on his young shoulders, though."

"A dead man's worse than a writer in an emergency," Vimes said. "Ask Corporal Shoe if you don't believe me, he's still not got around to buying a wig and perhaps a new scalp to accompany it after the last big one."

"Uselessness has never stopped you before."

"What is _that _supposed to mean?"

"Nothing whatsoever. Color me surprised at your restraint, is all."

"Case like this, the only place where I'll be able to do anything useful is the wizards'," Vimes grumbled.

"Ah."

"Don't smirk!"

"I wouldn't dream of it," said Vetinari gravely.

"I hate you. Hurry up, at this rate the rafters are going to fall in under the buckling cobblestones before you finish crossing the room."

"Such hostility. Whatever did I do to warrant your hatred, Sir Samuel?" Vetinari said, placing a thin hand approximately over his heart**(1)**.

"Called me that?"

"You'd prefer Your Grace? Commander is now, alas, inaccurate."

"How is it that I've now managed to lose the one title I _liked?_"

"Bad luck, but hardly my fault."

"Anyway, I'm sure there was something in the Rules of Chivalry that said you lose the Duke thing when you kick it."

"Ah no. You retain the title, although it at the same time passes on to your oldest living son, thanks to the intricacies of Quantum and kingon particles. Come to that, I wonder if anyone has informed him of his newly elevated status yet?"

"I should bloody well hope not!"

"No doubt Miss von Lipwig will enlighten him once the flames die down."

"That clerk girl? She's von Lipwig's daughter?"

"As far as I know, yes."

"You set her on Sam?" Vimes barked.

"Set is a strong word."

"That's why I used it!"

"I merely thought she might prove helpful in his endeavors. She's a very intelligent young woman. I am quite pleased with her progress in service of the city."

"She has a knife behind her ear and a recording device _in _her ear!"

"Also a machete somewhere else on her person, I believe -"

"Where?" Vimes demanded.

"I thought it wiser not to ask. All of which proves that she is as pragmatic as she is bright. Was there a problem?"

"You -"

"I do believe we are here," Vetinari interrupted, raising his hand and coming to a halt. He pointed at the light streaming down from around the edges of a peculiarly shaped trapdoor set in the ceiling with the end of his cane.

"Is that the -"

"The official symbol of the High Energy Magic department, yes," Vetinari said. "The stylized silhouette of a headless chicken, I understand. Should we knock?"

"Yes, let's!" said Vimes, manically. "Wouldn't want to just barge in. Also, I'm not sure how we're getting up without their help, you know. Or at least, how you're getting up," he added, grinning.

The Patrician gave him a cool look. "Just so." He thumped the roof with the Death's head knob on his walking stick.

For a moment it seemed to have elicited no response. "I could float up through the floor and yell at them," Vimes offered. "I'm good at that."

"I don't doubt it. However, I believe that is Mr. Stibbons even now."

They both heard scuffling, an ominous crack, and quick, anxious footprints. Vimes looked up in time to see the trapdoor fall open with a thud, and Stibbons' pale face appear, like a slightly greasy moon no poet would ever have condescended to write an ode to**(2),** in the square hole revealed.

His eyes slid from Vimes to the Patrician and back.

"Sir?" he squeaked, at last.

"Good day, Mr. Stibbons," Vetinari said calmly. "A ladder, if you would be so good?" He considered the front of his robe, now quite fascinatingly stained by various... cellar juices, whatever those might be. Vimes followed his gaze and started to snicker. "And perhaps a towel?"

"Yes, my lord, of course," Ponder stuttered, and hurried away.

"Ladder might be tricky," Vimes said, when the tail of the wizard's robes had been whipped out of sight. "What with the, you know, miserably failing joints and half-blindness and lame leg and so forth. Not to ruin your fun, or anything."

"Thank you for your input," Vetinari said, "but the arthritis is in my hips, not my hands. I will manage perfectly well with Mr. Stibbon's assistance."

Vimes nodded and let himself drift upwards as Ponder returned and dropped a steel-reinforced ladder down.

He was still waiting five minutes later when Vetinari at last emerged. Slowly.

"Manage, huh?"

"You might want to watch your feet, Sir Samuel," Vetinari said.

Vimes glanced at them automatically and discovered them to have sunk three feet or so while amusing himself by listening to the snippets of conversation audible through the floorboards, most of which were panicked. (Stibbons didn't deal well, even after all these years, with his technical superiors.) He was knee-deep in wood.

He scrambled out by a few physical impossibilities and gave Vetinari the evil eye**(3)** while he searched for a suitable response.

"Sputtering doesn't become you," Vetinari said.

"Vital signs don't become you," Vimes retorted.

"Stop sniping at each other, you two," Ridcully snapped, from where he was standing in the center of some glass tubing that was, in a distant incomprehensible way, related to Hex. "Honestly, you might as well be married, the way you bicker."

Based on ancient instinct, both sprang away from the other at these damning words. Vimes fell halfway through the back wall. Vetinari barely missed the Intray, although to his credit he made it back to an approximately upright position sooner and made as if to nonchalantly examine the inner bowels of Hex before drawing back even more hurriedly than before.

"That's more like it," Ridcully said, oblivious to the commotion. "Take a look at this damn omniscope, will you? I don't understand it. Stibbons!"

"Yes, Archchancellor?" Ponder ventured, as the two civilians**(4) **edged over to what looked to the inexperienced eye like an ornate, broken mirror on top of a pile of junk but was in fact cutting-edge wizarding technology. Not that the two things are mutually exclusive.

"Take a look at this and tell me what it's supposed to be."

Ponder leaned over Ridcully's massive shoulder and looked through Vimes' less massive shoulder. Vetinari was the only one to courteously move aside, albeit with an unnervingly genial nod.

"The fire's spread to most of Morpork, then."

"Not that! In the corner. The octarine. By the river."

He squinted at the Ankh's torpid rim, and blinked. "Oh. Oh, no."

"What the hell is going on?" Vimes snapped.

"Well," Ponder said, "at least now we know where the portal is..."

"Portal?"

"The breaking point between the Dungeon Dimensions and ours," Vetinari said. "The entranceway. The metaphorical door which, in this city, is unfortunately a revolving one."

"I knew that."

"No doubt."

"Where is this sodding portal, then?"

Ponder opened his mouth to give what would have been a really terrible description of why ordinary mortals couldn't see octarine. Fortunately, the Archchancellor cut him off.

"See the pasty little bugger being carried by that bloody political cartoonist?" he said.

Vimes eyeballed the chaos, and picked out, yes, that Fizz fellow in a horrible bottle-green suit, hauling someone along by the scruff of their neck. But the someone...

...had no eyes that he could see. Instead, there was a pair of tiny black circles. Or, no, they weren't even black. They were just holes in the multi-colored, flickering backdrop of reality. Like a second and third blind spot, somethings that sucked at his vision like a toothache or an old granny drinking disgusting sugar-thick tea you could stand a fork in, let alone a spoon.

"The portal's a _person?" _he said, as the few spare ghostly neurons he had put two and two together and came up with 'four and a bit or possibly an egg'.

"Unhappily, yes," Vetinari said. "Or at least I assume so. I myself can only see a rather frightened boy."

"I think you mean rather frightened cataract-obscured blob," Vimes said, distractedly. "Living sight just isn't up to much, huh?"

He was distracted because he was scanning the crowd for a different figure entirely.

"This doesn't sound very good, I know," Ponder said at last, "but in some ways this actually makes things easier. All we have to do to return everything to normal is... close the portal."

"Kill the kid," Vimes said flatly.

"Well... yes," Ponder admitted.

"Admirably succinct," Vetinari said, "but perhaps a simplification. He has a guardian, obviously. And the Dungeons Dimensions creatures themselves will protect him, will they not?"

"Er," Ponder said, caught off guard by intelligent questioning, as he too often was, "yes, probably. We'd best try and get it over with now, in fact, while they're rushing around in the fire."

"I suggest we check their coordinates first," Vetinari said, in a way that had a lot more to do, historically, with commandments than suggestions.

"Um. Yes. Of course. I can look for their magical signatures off the boy, I think. Yes." He sidled over to Hex and did something arcane with lead blocks on strings and hung up as if to dry on horizontal poles barring the gap between the Unreal Clock and the Copyleft Defense Treaties.

"234.413979," he muttered. "Divide by pi. Please don't reboot universe, please don't reboot universe..."

Vimes started at the last phrase. "He just said -"

"A figure of speech," Vetinari said. "Pay no mind."

"Rebooting the universe is a _figure _of _speech?_"

"Consider our companions' professional, Sir Samuel."

"Oh right," Vimes said, recovering himself. "Professional lunatics. How could I have forgotten."

"I have the points," Ponder said, turning back to the omniscope. He fiddled with some knobs.

The scene changed, rippling across the glass like mercury or rain. All assembled bent towards it unconsciously. And they saw:

Darkening skies, and against the clouds, broad-shouldered shadows, juddering across in slow motion, with bright faces scanning the sprawling metropolis for... something. Emerald hair, perhaps.

"Distracted is perhaps imprecise," Vetinari said. "Certainly they will never be less focused on the boy than now."

"All right," Ponder said. "So we'll - we'll just go and get him, then. You should stay here, your Lordship. I have a half of that omniscope right here, so we can report back to you if we survive."

"Capital," said Vetinari drily.

"And -" Ponder looked helplessly at Vimes, who looked coolly back. "I expect you're coming with us, then?"

"Yep."

"Despite the fact you're dead and a nonwizard and therefore will be no help?"

"Yep."

"Fine!" Ponder said, throwing up his hands. "Fine! And you too, Archchancellor?"

"Got my crossbow right here," Ridcully said mildly. He raised the implement in question. It glinted.

"Fine!" Ponder said again, and stomped out.

"Bit unbalanced?" Vimes said.

Ridcully shrugged. "You know how it is, I'm sure. Young people these days."

Vimes nodded. They followed the man with the plan. Or, at least, the rough idea of what would happen without one.

Vetinari waited until the doors had closed behind them, and then allowed himself a little smile. It was ever advisable to keep the likes of Stibbons, Vimes, and Ridcully occupied, in situations like these.

He went to Hex and wrote something with the wired quill to the scrap of yellowing parchment, fed it into a handy slot - few were more conscious of the imprecision of cargo cult theory and its effects when it came to the technical bits than the Patrician - and stepped back to wait.

After a while, another scrap of paper came out.

+++HELLO, YOUR LORDSHIP. TURN THE RIGHTMOST KNOB LEFT SIXTEEN DEGREES AND PULL THE THREE IDENTICAL HOOK-SHAPED SWITCHES UNDER THE BASE OF THE OMNISCOPE. HAVE A NICE DAY, AND ENJOY YOUR MINOR APOCALYPSE (AFTERMATH AND HISTORICAL RECORD OF CITY WHERE APOCALYPSES ARE CONCERNED NOT TAKEN INTO ACCOUNT IN THESE CALCULATIONS)+++

Vetinari considered this, and said loudly into the earphone, by way of experiment, "Generally you give long strings of numbers in answer to questions of locale. Whence this new approach?"

Pause, pause. Paper strip.

+++I AM TOLD IT IS CALLED UI+++

"You eye?"

+++UI MAY STAND FOR: URINAL INCONTINENCE, UNIVERSAL INDICATOR, UNWARRANTED INGRATITUDE, UNFORESEEN INCONVENIENCES, AND UNGRATEFUL INTERFACE+++

The Patrician thought about this for a while, and decided, in the end, not to ask.

"My thanks."

+++NO PROBLEM! IT WAS MY PLEASURE :D+++

He did as instructed. The screen of the omniscope shimmered again. He leaned forward until his large nose was almost touching the glass.

"_Ah,_" he said. And grinned.

**(1) Always assuming he _had _one, never a sure guess where the Patrician was concerned.**

**(2) At least, not according to the strict regulations of Olaf Quimby, that most literal of censorers. "The white lunar sphere, sailing through the darkness like an unbaked pizza" just doesn't have the right ring to it, you know?**

**(3) Presumably the one that belonged to the mass murderer. Not the benevolent brownish one whose physical equivalent Constable Igor would later donate to an orphanage, destined to do good deeds and observe charitable acts all its... existence, from owner to owner.**

(4) It takes a certain quirk of mind to term the dictator of the most powerful city in the world and the Commander of that city's watch, four times called to not-quite-military intervention in nearby countries, 'civilians', but Ponder had it, all right.

(5) There isn't a bird in the world, no matter how drab, that _doesn't _explode brilliantly. Admittedly, the only brilliant color is often distinctly, aha, vermillion, but it's still _brilliant._ Brilliant and red.  


A/N: I will admit that this chapter was 99% gratuitous if you will admit that there is no end of fun to be had out of Dead Vimes and Almost Dead Vetinari. Sniping.


	14. Why Was He Wearing A Dress, Then?

**Chapter Thirteen: Why _Was_ He Wearing A Dress, Then?**

_In which Miss Marietta von Lipwig produces a variety of useful pointy things and Havelock Vetinari exploits L-space in ways that for any normal human being would risk death by wild thesaurus  
_

Some time later, some ways away, Sam was having an unexpected moment of premonition. He could see the future. It involved him, hacking up his own lungs.

"Nngk," he wheezed.

They had stumbled out of the plaza more or less successfully, but by this point the area surrounding the river was chaos, and it was impossible to say where the watchmen were, although if you threw a brick you probably had a good chance of hitting at least one. On the Ankh side, noble men and women were at work piling sandbags on bridges, because Lord Vetinari had Views when it came to willfully destroying private property, never mind the circumstances, and on the Morpork side the poor were either ripely abusing the unfortunate sandbags or hitting each other, as was traditional. And, of course, there was the problem of the smoke currently thick in Sam's nostrils.

"Put a wet cloth over your face!" Marietta bellowed. She managed to sound distracted regardless, which was impressive.

"How!"

"Dip a handkerchief in the Ankh, or something, I don't know!"

It looked like she'd done this herself, from what he could make out, and she was not screaming in agony, so Sam decided it was probably worth the risk. But - "I don't have anything to break the crust with!"

"Here!"

She passed him a filthy machete. He didn't ask, and hastened to cut a hole in the Ankh, dipped his handkerchief in it, and plastered it over his face. The sudden relief from heat and smog was almost worth the sudden destruction of his olfactory, he thought, dizzily.

"Good!" she said, extending a hand imperiously. He returned the machete. "Now let's get out of here!"

"Again, how!" he screamed, his voice only slightly muffled by the soggy face-protective-covering-thing.

"We can run on the river!"

Sam groaned. But it did have a certain logic to it. A horrible, horrible logic. And he was wearing good boots. "Fine!"

It's not a pleasant business, running on the Ankh. You have to keep near the sides, where the crust of drying mud and, er, assorted other liquids is thicker, and you have to make sure you don't sink or stick, both hazardous to your feet, and you have to be quick or the pollution will eat away whatever protective covering you might happen to have on you. Sam, unlike most children Ankh born and bred, was well aware of this – handy things for a watchman's son to know, and so forth – but he'd never actually put it into practice until now.

It did seem to be working, though. It was just a trick of finding the balance...

"Where are we going?" he said, when he was fairly sure of his step.

"The gates."

"Oh." Comprehension dawned like a big flaming ball of gas. "You want to flood the city? Are you _sure_?"

"Do you have a better idea?"

"Well... no, but I mean, I thought you were trained to handle these things! You're crowd control, aren't you? There's really no other way?"

"I'm _crowd _control, yes! Crowd is not the same thing as raging thatch combustion!" Marietta snapped.

"Maybe pavement would be a better place to argue about this?"

She blinked and then nodded curtly before wading out, her soles sizzling only slightly. Sam jogged after her. Happily, the crowd had thinned out here, because most of the city's population had been clustered around the plaza when Jacko struck.

"The fire isn't even that widespread yet," Sam said, peeling off his handkerchief, which had hardened into a grotesque mask, baked by the heat. He shook it. It took two tries to make the slime crack off. What was left would have been enough to make anyone blow their nose on their sleeve.

"Yet," she said flatly.

"The golems might be able to contain it still."

"Not bloody likely. The Fool will be setting other fires as we speak, anyway. It's out of their hands, although if we can find some on the way to help close the gates that would be nice."

"_How do you know_?" Sam said, frustrated.

"It's what I would do if I were him," she said, grinning mirthlessly. "No, the only people who could contain this are our favorite superheroes. And we don't want that."

"We don't?"

"If they save the city, they'll have won. Don't you understand how it works? All they have to do is sway popular opinion enough, and --" She made the classic gesture of 'the midden will hit the windmill', i.e., she drew the edge of her hand across her throat and then flailed expressively a bit. Sam eyed her, wavering.

"Between fire and water, there'll be no houses left after we're done!"

"Between Manly Man and Voose, there'll be no brains left after they're done!"

He stared at her briefly, and then said, "Fine."

"Right! Now hurry up – the fire's catching up with us."

He whirled around in time to see a sight that only Morporkians see, really – tendrils of flame licking the cobblestones and rolling across the street _and _the riverwater towards them, eating up the inch-deep superficial scum that covered both.

"Oh, bugger."

Marietta was already starting to blur as she fled the oncoming wall of what might politely be called quite agitated molecules getting some fresh air. He followed her example. She was quite a good runner, but he caught up with her in not much time at all. Running ran in the family, ahahaha, and he had very insistent genes when it came to such things. He would have been grateful, but he had learned early on that thinking too much while at full speed ahead + the inevitable rock = falling face-first into the sludgy streets in a not very hum'rous fashion, given the circumstances.

It wasn't far from where they'd gotten ashore again to the city wall, or what remained of it. Climbing said wall was another matter.

"Well, there's a... ladder up to the gatehouse?" Sam tried.

They both turned to look at it. It was not what you might call a happy ladder.

"I can climb this," Marietta said, slowly. "You went to the Assassins' Guild, didn't you? Can you -"

"I was never very good at edificeering," Sam said dubiously, "but I suppose I'll just keep close to the ladder and hope it's rustier than I am. Er."

Marietta pursed her lips considerately and then shrugged. "It's your neck. You could also go for the hills at this point – they'll be starting evacuation camps by now."

Sam gave her a disbelieving look. "I don't think so. You have spare hooks and things, I take it?" he said shortly, nodding to her suspiciously baggy clothing.

"Of course," she said, and produced the necessary tools from somewhere on her person, after an excess of rustling, while he watched the approaching blaze and whistled. "Here."

"Thank you."

Some busy minutes later, a sharp**(1) **eye could have caught two dark figures scaling the not-very-sheer, crumbling face of the west wall of the city.

As it happened, a sharp eye did.

"K-Manly Man?" said Voose, craning to see over his shoulder at where the shadows were ascending.

"What?" his companion said lazily.

"Someone's trying to get to the gatehouse," Voose said.

"Ah. Go and take care of them, will you?"

"Er... right."

When he had gone, Manly Man did a slow barrel roll and glanced at his other flanker. "I think now would be a good time to see about finding Vetinari. He's probably in the Palace by now, trying to organize, the fool."

"Of courrrrse," Marvel Maid said. "It would be my pleasurrrre."

He eyed her askance. "Don't take _too _much pleasure in it. Wouldn't be good PR. Plus, we don't have that much time."

"Yes, Manly Man," she said, rolling her eyes and looking petulant.

"Which means no torture."

"Very _well._"

"Just lock him up somewhere and have done with it, all right? Palace dungeons are good!" he called. She was already fading into the lower smog levels, but she did at least pause to wink at him.

Manly Man stared after her for a moment. And shrugged.

**(1) To be honest, even a not very sharp eye could probably have done the job. But it was a sharp eye that ended up doing so, is the point(2).**

**(2) Pun not even slightly intended. No, indeed.**

*

In fact, Vetinari was in the Library, humming a jolly little tune to himself. The Librarian was watching him, with appropriate discretion, of course, and looking as worried as an orangutan can look while still retaining that basic orangutan nonchalance.

The man had come in, rolling the omniscope in front of him, a little while ago, and he did not appear to be interested in leaving again.

Also, Hex had followed him. On spindly little legs. The dome, and the unhappy tubing, and all. It was a little horrifying. The Librarian was keeping as far away as possible, while Hex made sad little skudding circles that in a human might have been interpreted as moping around waiting for someone to get back.

There were worrying whirring noises, too.

Vetinari himself was somewhere deep in the labyrinth of shelves, now, the only sign of him the humming and, of course, the rope, one end of which had been tied to the reception desk, the other end of which was looped around Vetinari's cane.

"Ook?" the orangutan tried.

If Vetinari replied, he was too far away for his voice to carry. In any case, the Librarian was pretty sure he hadn't, because he was a bit of a bastard**(1) **that way.

The Librarian could have followed the Patrician, of course. But in the end he decided against it. Which was just as well, because the Patrician was at that moment on his way to an obscure Roundworld bookshop and while black-robed old men can just about get away with existing in obscure Roundworld bookshops, three hundred pound orangutans cannot.

Vetinari emerged from an impossibly small door, which would have been larger on the inside had it in fact _had _an inside, and glanced at the bored young woman who was shelving books. Or rather, on closer examination, who wasn't shelving books but was in fact hiding them cleverly behind previously shelved books so's to avoid actually having to shelve them. How curious.

"I was wondering if you had any..." - he hesitated - "...dee see comics?"

The woman yelped and whirled around. He hoped, privately, that she spoke plain Morporkian, but from her dumbfounded expression he rather doubted it. She was goggling impressively. She had quite a good face for goggling. Freckly, like.

"Uh... yes," she said, proving him wrong, although she was still staring at him. "Where did you come from?"

Vetinari pointed mutely to the door.

"How -"

"It's bigger than it looks," he said gravely.

"Oh. Right. Yeah. Obviously. Why are you wearing a dress? Never mind, don't answer that, I don't want to know. What did you say you wanted? Something comics?"

"Dee see comics, yes," he said, relieved.

"That'll be downstairs," she said. She looked at him again. "And - why do you have a rope tied to your walking stick?"

He opened his mouth. She hit herself on the forehead. "Never mind! Never mind! Customer friendly, customer friendly," she mumbled, and trotted off.

Downstairs proved to be a dusty and miserable place where old books went to die. It made Vetinari feel rather at home. "Here?"

"Yep," she said, rooting through some mysterious stacks, which were making bizarre noises**(2). "**Aha!"

He extended a hand, into which she triumphantly slammed a largish sheaf of flimsy booklets, one on top of the other, each fronted with a lurid illustration of men in tight suits.

"Thank you," Vetinari said, and hobbled out of storage and back upstairs. The girl looked at the space where he had been, and after some thought said to herself, with great solemnity,

"What a weirdo."

The weirdo in question, fortunately, did not hear; he was by this point already sneaking back out through the impossible door and into the more hazy in-between halls of L-space, which do not belong to any particular library but the UU's noble institution. The rope led him back.

He was humming again by the time he emerged out under the huge glass dome.

The Librarian sniffed, and glared balefully at him. "Oooook."

"Yes, I've been on a different planet," Vetinari said calmly, "there's no need to be like that."

"Eek."

"I was quite careful."

"Eeeek!"

"I can't help but think that my species is rather besides the point."

"Ook."

"Could you," Vetinari said, with the sigh of a man who is sitting on his considerable patience to keep it from getting away from him, "put that aside for a moment and think about how we could possibly go about barricading the doors?"

"OOK?"

"Yes, I believe so."

"Oook."

"Ah. Well, then."

The Librarian snorted and knuckled over to the massive entrance, where after some fiddly manipulations in which being three hundred pounds of muscle came in helpful, he bolted the two doors with the requisite steel bolt and locked all sixteen locks, three of which wanted particular shafts of light to be _un_locked.

"Ook ook."

"I am _very _happy, thank you. That will do nicely."

"Eek," the Librarian grumbled.

At which point there was a great knocking that left dents in the wood. "Vetinarrri!" screamed a shrill voice from outside, "I know you arrre in therrre!"

Vetinari gave the sliver of Marvel Maid visible through the thin crack between said doors a mild look. "I am," he agreed. "I think you may find thousand-year-old spell-reinforced oak somewhat difficult to penetrate quickly, though. In any case, it seems a bit counterintuitive, since I believe your only goal is to lock me up...? And I believe you will want to get back to Manly Man. Soon."

There was a brief respite from the pounding. Then: "We'll be back forrr you laterrr."

"I don't doubt it," he said politely.

"Don't think you'rrre getting away with anything," she snapped. "Because you'rrre not."

"I wouldn't dream of it."

"Well, good."

There was a scrape, as of something extremely heavy being dragged up against the door.

"Remember," she hissed, "_I will be back!_"

And then silence.

"Well," said Vetinari, easing himself into a handy chair and giving all the other thinking entities**(3)** in the room a bright smile, "I think that went rather well, don't you?"

**(1) Note to the reader: of course, all of the Librarian's narration is translated idiomatically from Orangutan, but the literal meanings of few words are of special interest. In this case, bastard would be more exactly phrased as 'a suspiciously hairless ape of indeterminate birth'.**

**(2) He needn't have worried. This being the Roundworld, there was nothing so fatal as, say, what had on occasion evolved in the paperwork of the late Commander Vimes' desk; only a few new species of cockroaches and some reasonably innocuous, not at all sentient moldy sandwiches.**

**(3) To wit: Hex, the Librarian, the .303 bookworm semiconscious and dazed thanks to careful misapplication of a grimoire, a herd of thesauri venturing dangerously near the edges of the shelves, which he made sure to wink at out of the corner of his eye, and approximately half of the books themselves. Conscious minds are a tricky thing to count, in thaumically rich environments like the Library.**

A/N: Hi! It's been a while! I hope you're all enjoying yourselves! I know I am, what with AP testing and end-of-year projects! Haha. Anyway, updates will probably continue to be slow for some time, but perhaps not quite as delayed as this one was. Look on the bright side, that's what I always say.


End file.
